Abstract
The decline in snowpack across the western United States is one of the most pressing threats posed by climate change to regional economies and livelihoods. Earth system models are important tools for exploring past and future snowpack variability, yet their coarse spatial resolutions distort local topography and bias spatial patterns of accumulation and ablation. Here, we explore pattern-based statistical downscaling for spatially-continuous interannual snowpack estimates. We find that a few leading patterns capture the majority of snowpack variability across the western US in observations, reanalyses, and free-running simulations. Pattern-based downscaling methods yield accurate, high resolution maps that correct mean and variance biases in domain-wide simulated snowpack. Methods that use large-scale patterns as both predictors and predictands perform better than those that do not and all are superior to an interpolation-based “delta change” approach. These findings suggest that pattern-based methods are appropriate for downscaling interannual snowpack variability and that using physically meaningful large-scale patterns is more important than the details of any particular downscaling method.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 3225-3241 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Climate Dynamics |
Volume | 58 |
Issue number | 11-12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2022 |
Keywords
- Canonical correlation analysis
- Empirical orthogonal functions
- Snow water equivalent
- Teleconnections
- Water resources
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Atmospheric Science
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R source code for "Pattern-based downscaling of snowpack variability in the western United States"
Gauthier, N. (Contributor), Anchukaitis, K. J. (Contributor) & Coulthard, B. (Contributor), ZENODO, 2021
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5110395, https://zenodo.org/record/5110395
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