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The Study of Temporal and Spatial Variability of Degree Day Factor of Snowmelt in Colorado (open access)

The Study of Temporal and Spatial Variability of Degree Day Factor of Snowmelt in Colorado

Snowmelt is one of the major sources of surface water supply and ground-water recharge in high elevation areas and can also cause flooding in snow dominated watersheds. Direct estimation of daily snowmelt requires daily snow water equivalent (SWE) measurements that are not always available, especially in places without monitoring stations. There are two alternative approaches to modeling snowmelt without using direct measurements of SWE, temperature-based and energy-based models. Due to its simplicity, computational efficiency, and less input data requirement, the temperature-based method is commonly used than the energy-based method. In the temperature-index approach snowmelt is estimated as a linear function of average air temperature, and the slope of the linear function is called the degree-day factor (DDF). Hence, the DDF is an essential parameter for utilizing the temperature-based method to estimate snowmelt. Thereby, to analyze the spatial properties of DDF, 10 years DDF from the entire state of Colorado was calculated for this research. Likewise, to study the temporal properties, DDFs for 27 years from the White Yampa water basin and the Colorado Headwaters water basin were calculated. As a part of the spatial analysis, the calculated DDFs were correlated with spatial variables (slope, aspect, latitude and elevation) and a …
Date: May 2016
Creator: Pokhrel, Pranav
System: The UNT Digital Library