Climate change-resilient snowpack estimation in the Western United States

Cowherd, Marianne; Mital, Utkarsh; Rahimi, Stefan; Girotto, Manuela; Schwartz, Andrew; Feldman, Daniel

doi:10.1038/s43247-024-01496-3

Title: Climate change-resilient snowpack estimation in the Western United States

Journal Article · 18 June 2024 · Communications Earth & Environment

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01496-3 · OSTI ID:2375572

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; Rahimi, Stefan;

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Abstract In the 21st century, warmer temperatures and changing atmospheric circulation will likely produce unprecedented changes in Western United States snowfall ^1–3 , with impacts on the timing, amount, and spatial patterns of snowpack ^4–7 . The ~900 snow pillow stations are indispensable to water resource management by measuring snow-water equivalent (SWE) ^8,9 in strategic but fixed locations ^10,11 . However, this network may not be impacted by climate change in the same way as the surrounding area ¹² and thus fail to accurately represent unmeasured locations; climate change thereby threatens our ability to measure the effects of climate change on snow. In this work, we show that maintaining the current peak SWE estimation skill is nonetheless possible. We find that explicitly including spatial correlations—either from gridded observations or learned by the model—improves skill at predicting distributed snowpack from sparse observations by 184%. Existing artificial intelligence methods can be useful tools to harness the many available sources of snowpack information to estimate snowpack in a nonstationary climate.

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Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0022158; AC02-05CH11231; SC0016605

OSTI ID:: 2375572

Journal Information:: Communications Earth & Environment, Journal Name: Communications Earth & Environment Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 5; ISSN 2662-4435

Publisher:: Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United Kingdom

Language:: English

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