The BOREAS Information System

HYD-9: From Micro-Scale to Meso-Scale Snowmelt, Soil Moisture and Evapotranspiration from Distributed Hydrologic Models

P.I.(s): Ric D. Soulis -- University of Waterloo
Co-I(s): Michael Jasinski -- NASA/GSFC; G. Kite -- National Hydrology Research Institute; Nicholas Kouwen -- Univ. of Waterloo; Robert Leconte -- Univ. of Quebec a` Monteal; Dennis Lettenmaier -- Univ. of Washington; Danny Marks -- USGS

Objectives: This project seeks to identify, through field measurements and computer modeling, the space-time distribution of meltwater supply to the soil during the spring melt period, and the evolution of soil moisture, evaporation, and runoff from the end of the snowmelt period through freeze-up. The snow modeling activity consists of two components: The first makes use of existing, "off-the-shelf" models to forecast the onset and spatial extent of snowmelt and meltwater supply to the soil column prior to the 1994 IFCs. The second phase extends, implements, and verifies a physically based energy balance snowmelt model of the two sites, and evaluates approaches to aggregating snowmelt predictions and measurements based on the model to large scales, up to the size of a rectangle of several hundred km containing the northern and southern sites. The soil moisture modeling is being conducted by Soulis and Engman, based on a grouped response unit method, and allows characterization of soil moisture, evaporation, and runoff for the entire northern and southern sites. The primary external data requirements of the project are for:

• winter period surface meteorological and energy flux data
• high quality DEM data
• vegetation characterization, at the scale of the DEM
• supplemental snow-free period precipitation data at the local (hillslope) scale, perhaps along selected transects

HYD-9 Pictures

Rain gauge at SSA-OBS

HYD-9 Data Sets