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Dynamic of Snow Cover’s Spatial Distribution over Alpine Topography

3D Image of Laser Scanning measurements at Wannengrat catchment

The project addresses the description and modeling of the dynamic of snow Cover’s spatial distribution over Alpine topography at scales of 1m, 10m, 100m & 1km – 100km during accumulation and ablation.

The main goal of the study is the description and modelling of the snow covers dynamic depending on the underlying topography. Applications of the project are provided for hydrological, snow-climatologic and avalanche dynamic modeling as subpixel-parametrisations or extreme value statistics.

Steps of the project

2008: Dynamics of snow depths variability in the entire Swiss Alpine region: "Hysteretic dynamics of seasonal snow depth distribution in the Swiss Alps", Publikation in "Geophysical Research Letters" (download).
November 2008 - Juni 2009: Field season at the Wannengrat test site near Davos using a Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) in collaboration with the team investiagting the spatial variability of snowpack stability. Biweekly snow depths measurement with a horizontal resolotion of 1m and a coverage of alomost 1 km². Main objective of the mesurements is to record the seasonal dynamics of snow depths variability on irregular Alpine topography during accumulation and ablation period at scales between 10 m to 1000 m.
April 2009: Analysis of the numerical weather prediction model COSMO-7, in collaboration with MeteoSwiss. COSMO-7 kan be used by a simple correction routine to determine daily new snow water equivalent and snow depths on a regular mesh size of 7 km. Publication: "A virtual network for estimating daily new snow water equivalent and snow depths in the Swiss Alps" for "Annals of Glaciology".
2010: Hysteresis of the Alpine snow depths variability at scales between 10km to 100km. First dataset from the IMIS- und Observer mesuring network for operational avalanche warning. Second dataset from COSMO-7 weather prediction model (Bachethesis Nena Griessinger).
2010: Hysteretic dynamics of snow depths variability on irregular Alpine topography and its influence on the snow water equivalent in the wannengrat catchement.
2010: First simple stochastic model based on the observed dynamic of the seasonal development of snow depth variability

Modeled development of snow distribution on catchment scale (10m-1000m) during accumulation and ablation. Figure: Luca Egli (SLF/WSL)

Project team

Luca Egli
Tobias Jonas

Students / trainees

Nena Griessinger (2009)

Contact

Luca Egli