Abstract. Seasonal snowpack dynamics shape the biophysical and societal
characteristics of many global regions. However, snowpack accumulation and
duration have generally declined in recent decades, largely due to
anthropogenic climate change. Mechanistic understanding of snowpack
spatiotemporal heterogeneity and climate change impacts will benefit from
snow data products that are based on physical principles, simulated
at high spatial resolution, and cover large geographic domains. Most
existing datasets do not meet these requirements, hindering our ability to
understand both contemporary and changing snow regimes and to develop
adaptation strategies in regions where snowpack patterns and processes are
important components of Earth systems. We developed a computationally efficient process-based snow model, SnowClim,
that can be run in the cloud. The model was evaluated and calibrated at
Snowpack Telemetry (SNOTEL) sites across the western United States (US), achieving a
site-median root-mean-squared error for daily snow water equivalent (SWE) of 64 mm,
bias in peak SWE of −2.6 mm, and bias in snow duration of
−4.5 d when run hourly. Positive biases were found at sites with mean
winter temperature above freezing where the estimation of precipitation
phase is prone to errors. The model was applied to the western US (a domain
covering 3.1 million square kilometers) using newly developed forcing data created by
statistically downscaling pre-industrial, historical, and pseudo-global
warming climate data from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model.
The resulting product is the SnowClim dataset, a suite of summary climate
and snow metrics, including monthly SWE and snow
depth, as well as annual maximum SWE and snow cover duration, for the
western US at 210 m spatial resolution (Lute et al., 2021). The physical
basis, large extent, and high spatial resolution of this dataset enable
novel analyses of changing hydroclimate and its implications for natural and human systems.