Slack channel: #snowmelt

• Nicoleta Cristea ([email protected]) (Data Scientist)
• Steven Pestana ([email protected]) (Project Lead)
• Cassie Lumbrazo ([email protected])

• ASO lidar can provide snapshots of snowdepth across a watershed
• Previous geohackweek projects have developed tools for the spatial analysis of this data
• We want to expand these tools to investigate temporal changes in snow depth (melt) as a function of topgraphic variables

• Tuolumne River Basin is Cali water supply
• Expecting this climate change “2015 year” temperatures to continue
• Impacts of climate change on this water supply for future years
• Snow at elevation = water storage
• Previous work says that snowmelt will be slower in warmer temperatures- hypothesis?

• Incorporating streamflow, for modeling and water resources prediction
• Used for Model Evaluation
• Snow accumulation/snow change in depressions, where the model doesn’t capture this

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uhxMHkf9YgU2qVDntqTGSbzZlJY0v94X

• Snow depth (30m, ASO lidar-derived) 2014 - 2016
• DEM (30m, ASO lidar-derived)

• How does the change in snow depth (melt and accumulation) behave as a function of topography (slope, aspect, elevation) in the Tuolumne River watershed?
• How does the change in snow depth (melt and accumulation) behave as a function of forest cover (forested versus not forested) in the Tuolumne River watershed?
• How do these behaviors compare between relatively “normal” snowpack years (2014, 2016) and a year with much lower snowpack (2015 - representative of future conditions due to climate change)?
• Can we conclude that there is “slower snowmelt in a warmer world” (Musselman et al. 2017)?

• https://github.com/NCristea/NCristeaGEE

• Raster/array math

• NASA JPL - Airborne Snow Observatory
• Musselman, Keith N., et al. "Slower snowmelt in a warmer world." Nature Climate Change 7.3 (2017): 214. doi: 10.1038/nclimate3225 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3225.pdf
• Painter, T. H., Berisford, D. F., Boardman, J. W., Bormann, K. J., Deems, J. S., Gehrke, F., ... & Mattmann, C. (2016). The Airborne Snow Observatory: Fusion of scanning lidar, imaging spectrometer, and physically-based modeling for mapping snow water equivalent and snow albedo. Remote Sensing of Environment, 184, 139-152.