Assimilation of citizen science data in snowpack modeling using a new snow data set: Community Snow Observations

Abstract

A physically based snowpack evolution and redistribution model was used to test the effectiveness of assimilating crowd-sourced snow depth measurements collected by citizen scientists. The Community Snow Observations (CSO; https://communitysnowobs.org/, last access: 11 August 2021) project gathers, stores, and distributes measurements of snow depth recorded by recreational users and snow professionals in high mountain environments. These citizen science measurements are valuable since they come from terrain that is relatively undersampled and can offer in situ snow information in locations where snow information is sparse or nonexistent. The present study investigates (1) the improvements to model performance when citizen science measurements are assimilated, and (2) the number of measurements necessary to obtain those improvements. Model performance is assessed by comparing time series of observed (snow pillow) and modeled snow water equivalent values, by comparing spatially distributed maps of observed (remotely sensed) and modeled snow depth, and by comparing fieldwork results from within the study area. The results demonstrate that few citizen science measurements are needed to obtain improvements in model performance, and these improvements are found in 62% to 78% of the ensemble simulations, depending on the model year. Model estimations of total water volume from a subregion of the study area also demonstrate improvements in accuracy after CSO measurements have been assimilated. These results suggest that even modest measurement efforts by citizen scientists have the potential to improve efforts to model snowpack processes in high mountain environments, with implications for water resource management and process-based snow modeling.