H51K-1544
Evaluation of the changes in long-term Snow Water Equivalent trends in the Western US
Friday, 18 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Mu Xiao, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, Philip Mote, Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, Corvallis, OR, United States and Dennis P Lettenmaier, University of California Los Angeles, Department of Geography, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Abstract:
Snow is critical to the water resources of the Western U.S. The key hydrological variable is snow water equivalent (SWE). In a well known study, the second and third author, and others, evaluated trends in SWE across the Western U.S. (Mote et al., Bull. Am. Met. Soc., 2005). That paper showed that over the period 1950-1997, spring (April 1) SWE had declined over most of the region, a finding that was supported both by analysis of observations and modeling. We report here on an extension of the Mote et al analysis through 2015. Inclusion of the additional 18 years of data shows that the decreases in SWE across most of the region have continued, and the anomaly in the original analysis in SWE in the southern Sierras (towards increased SWE) is reduced.
