Upper Feather River Watershed

Energy budget changes impact arid mountain hydrology more than rain-snow transitions H33M-04

Temperature increases due to climate change will alter two main drivers of hydrology, energy and moisture, by reducing the fraction of precipitation falling as snow, as well as impacting the land surface energy budget. Recent hydrological work has studied the impacts of these two drivers using statistical analysis of basins with different average precipitation and climate as proxies for moisture and energy changes, however, very few studies have used modeling to explicitly separate energy budget changes from snow to rain transitions. Integrated models provide an opportunity to isolate these effects of climate change from natural interannual variability, the latter of which are difficult to tease out in field and statistical studies. Given that much of the world depends on mountain snowpack for their water supply, understanding hydrologic sensitivity to variability in phase and amount of precipitation, temperature and runoff in complex terrain is imperative.

2015-12-16

L Foster, RM Maxwell, and LA Bearup, American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting, 2015. San Francisco, CA.

Global or not applicable

Hydrology, Invasives, Rain, Snow

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