Effects of spatial aggregation of initial conditions and forcing data on modeling snowmelt using a land surface scheme

Abstract

Small-scale topography and snow redistribution have important effects on snow-cover heterogeneity and the timing, rate, and duration of spring snowmelt in mountain tundra environments. However, land surface schemes (LSSs) are usually applied as a means to provide large-scale surface states and vertical fluxes to atmospheric models and do not normally incorporate topographic effects or horizontal fluxes in their calculations. A study was conducted in Granger Creek, an 8-km2 catchment within Wolf Creek Research Basin in the Yukon Territory, Canada, to examine whether inclusion of the effects of wind redistribution of snow between landscape units, and slope and aspect in snowmelt calculations for tiles, could improve the simulation of snowmelt by an LSS. Measured snow accumulation, reflecting overwinter wind redistribution of snow, was used to provide initial conditions for the melt simulation, and physically based algorithms from a small-scale hydrological model were used to calculate radiation on slopes during melt. Based on consideration of the spatial distribution of snow accumulation, topography, and shrub cover in the basin, it was divided into five landscapes units (tiles) for simulation of mass and energy balance using an LSS during melt. Effects of averaging initial conditions and forcing data on LSS model performance were contrasted against distributed simulations. Results showed that, in most of the cases, simulations using aggregated initial conditions and forcing data gave unsuccessful descriptions of snow ablation whereas the incorporation of both snow-cover redistribution and slope and aspect effects in an LSS improved the prediction of snowmelt rate, timing, and duration. © 2008 American Meteorological Society.