HR: 0800h
AN: C31A-0290    [Abstracts]
TI: Mountain Snow System Interactions - An Integrative Approach
AU: * Landry, C C
EM: clandry@snowstudies.org
AF: Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, PO Box 190, Silverton, CO 81433 United States
AU: Painter, T H
EM: tpainter@nsidc.org
AF: National Snow and Ice Data Center, 449 UCB University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0449 United States
AU: Barrett, A P
EM: apbarrett@kryos.colorado.edu
AF: National Snow and Ice Data Center, 449 UCB University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0449 United States
AB: Snow scientists now have capabilities and opportunities unimagined in the 1950's due to refinements in field techniques and instrumentation, and the advent of remote sensing platforms. These technical advances enable snow scientists to observe the mountain snow system at virtually any spatial scale. Mountain snow covers are essential water resources in many regions and are increasingly recognized as sensitive bellwethers of global change. Earth system science requires datasets that capture the 'vital signs' of system states and interactions at multiple spatio/temporal scales. Snowmelt processes are influenced by complex interactions that occur over a range of spatial scales. Surface energy exchange states and storage of melt water within the snowpack are expected to dominate snowmelt at the point scale. At larger spatial scales, the influence on lateral movement of water through the snowpack by basin topography and stream network traits may begin to dominate runoff. At still larger scales, reductions in basin- scale snow albedo caused by aerosols or dusts originating from distant sources may become the dominant forcing agent. Models based on an understanding of snowpack processes at the point scale will tend to allow point-scale processes to dominate when integrated to the basin scale. Knowledge of how processes at different scales interact, and which processes dominate at which scales, is essential to the development of new models. Traditional snow observation protocols and existing datasets often fail to capture or represent earth-surface interactions and processes in ways that enhance the integrated investigation of the mountain snow system as a system. The Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies and its collaborators seek to facilitate the interdisciplinary, integrative development of a ?mountain snow system observation protocol? or MSSOP. A multi-modal, multi-scale, integrative MSSOP observation set would identify proxy measures of system behavior for routine and sustained observation at mountain snow system observatories such as the Senator Beck Basin Study Area in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. An MSSOP would facilitate mountain climate and weather modeling and verification, would support research and applications in global change science and regional resource and hazard management, provide a framework for analyzing, enhancing, and publishing existing snow datasets and observation programs, and represent a basis on which further hydrologic/snow system observatories are grown.
DE: 1860 Runoff and streamflow
DE: 1863 Snow and ice (1827)
DE: 1620 Climate dynamics (3309)
DE: 1640 Remote sensing
DE: 0305 Aerosols and particles (0345, 4801)
SC: Cryosphere [C]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting