National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Publication Abstracts

Aerenson et al. 2024, submitted

Aerenson, T., D. McCoy, and G. Elsaesser, 2024: Model spread and bias in snowpack in the American Mountain West. J. Climate, submitted.

As the climate is rapidly changing, we are faced with questions about which regions will become drier and which wetter. In many regions such as the American Mountain West the amount of moisture available for agriculture, drinking water, and industry is dependent on the depth of the wintertime snowpack that melts throughout the spring and summer, filling the downstream rivers and reservoirs. We provide an overview on how snowpack in the Mountain West relates to interannual climate variability in observations and reanalysis and how snowpack in reanalysis has changed during the past century of warming. We then compare these changes with the historical simulations from an ensemble of CMIP6 Global Climate Models (GCMs) to determine how skillful they are at predicting snowpack in the Mountain West, which models are the most skillful, and how we can constrain future predictions by selecting only the models with the best simulation of historical snowpack. We perform a decomposition of Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) trends and variability in reanalysis and CMIP6 models to determine if the model deficiencies in their SWE simulation are due to issues relating to their simulation of precipitation, fraction of precipitation occurring as snow, or the melt-rate of the snowpack. Finally, we construct machine learning emulator models trained on reanalysis that are useful diagnostic tools for the snowpack biases and show that most of the spread in the GCMs' prediction of historical snowpack change is due to spread in their simulation of regional surface temperature and moisture convergence.

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Export citation: [ BibTeX ] [ RIS ]

@unpublished{ae01000b,
  author={Aerenson, T. and McCoy, D. and Elsaesser, G.},
  title={Model spread and bias in snowpack in the American Mountain West},
  year={2024},
  journal={Journal of Climate},
  note={Manuscript submitted for publication}
}

TY  - UNPB
ID  - ae01000b
AU  - Aerenson, T.
AU  - McCoy, D.
AU  - Elsaesser, G.
PY  - 2024
TI  - Model spread and bias in snowpack in the American Mountain West
JA  - J. Climate
JO  - Journal of Climate
ER  -

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