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Recent advancements in remote sensing of snow (eg, lidar) have allowed for the characterization of mountain snowpacks at higher spatial resolutions (< 10-m), with higher vertical accuracy (< 20-cm), and covering entire catchments repeatedly throughout the snow season. Here, we use distributed snow water equivalent (SWE) maps over the Tuolumne River Basin (1180-km2, 1150-4000 m elevation range) in California, USA, from the Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) program for the period 2013-2017 (48 flight dates, 50-m resolution) to characterize the spatial and temporal variations in SWE distribution in a headwater catchment. Peak basin snow storage ranged between 142 M m3 in 2015 and 1467 M m3 in 2017 covering one of the widest ranges in recorded history. Basin empirical distributions vary between mono-and bi-modal distributions earlier in the season to exponential decaying distributions later in the …