Rain-on-snow events with combined snow melting and rainfall is a frequent cause of floods in Europe. Reflecting possible long-term changes in climate conditions, there is the question of climate change impacts on the runoff regime at the regional and local scale. An important part of the research in mountain areas is therefore the issue of possible future changes in snow and glacier melt regimes. The main objective of this project is to contribute to research on processes connected with snow accumulation and melting as a factor of flood risk in the context of changing environment and climate change. The main focus will be possible future changes in snowpack using regional climate models (RCM) and impacts on runoff regime of mountainous basins. The project solution will lean on up-to-date hydrological and geoinformation methods and tools, which are presently applied for modelling the runoff from melting snow. The research will be carried out in selected middle-large basins in Switzerland and in the Czech Republic. Modelling the evolution of the snowpack (snow cover area, snow water equivalent, snowpack duration etc.) will be made by means of energy balance and temperature-index modelling techniques. Simulations using results from RCMs models will be made in order to simulate possible future changes of above mentioned snowpack.
This data resource contains 9 files, created as part of the work "Spatio-temporal Patterns of High Mountain Asia's Snowmelt Season Identified with an Automated Snowmelt Detection Algorithm, 1987-2016" by T. Smith, B. Bookhagen, and A. Rheinwalt (http://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2017-67). Full description of the methods can be found in the published paper. Data tracks the onset, end, and length of the snowmelt period in High Mountain Asia over the period 1987-2016.
Three HDF files (.h5) containing Snowmelt Onset, End, and Period lengths for 1987-2016 (shape 111 x 81 x 29). Numbers are provided relative to October First, previous year (ie, Snowmelt onset in 1988 is Onset + Oct 1, 1987).
Six TIF files, showing the average Snowmelt Onset, End and Period and Trends in the same three variables. Data format is GeoTIFF.