Authors
K Hale, S Godsey, S Havens, DG Marks, P Kormos, E Trujillo, AR Hedrick, CL Enslin, AH Winstral, JP McNamara, TE Link
Publication date
2020/12
Journal
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
Volume
2020
Pages
H225-05
Description
The rain-snow transition zone in the western mountains of the United States is hydrologically sensitive to small atmospheric changes because temperatures often hover near the freezing point of water, potentially changing the snow fraction of precipitation. During storms, that snow fraction is also subject to wind redistribution much more than the rain fraction, implying that temperature changes may affect spatial heterogeneity of snowpacks at the rain-snow transition. As heterogeneous snowpacks melt seasonally or episodically during rain-on-snow events, the combination of melt and rain—known as surface water inputs (SWI)—may substantially differ from precipitation. However, predicting spatiotemporal patterns of SWI remains difficult because of these complex interactions between snow fraction, wind redistribution, and rain-on-snow events. To understand the drivers of spatiotemporal patterns of SWI in wet and …