Modelling liquid water transport in snow under rain-on-snow conditions – considering preferential flow

Würzer, Sebastian; Wever, Nander; Juras, Roman; Lehning, Michael; Jonas, Tobias

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-1741-2017

Articles | Volume 21, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-1741-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-1741-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 3

Research article

|

24 Mar 2017

Research article |

| 24 Mar 2017

Modelling liquid water transport in snow under rain-on-snow conditions – considering preferential flow

Sebastian Würzer, Nander Wever, Roman Juras, Michael Lehning, and Tobias Jonas

Data sets

Meteorological and snowpack measurements from Weissfluhjoch WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF https://doi.org/10.16904/1

Model code and software

An 18-yr long (1993–2011) snow and meteorological dataset from a mid-altitude mountain site (Col de Porte, France, 1325 m alt.) for driving and evaluating snowpack models S. Morin, Y. Lejeune, B. Lesaffre, J.-M. Panel, D. Poncet, P. David, and M. Sudul https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-4-13-2012

Short summary

We discuss a dual-domain water transport model in a physics-based snowpack model to account for preferential flow (PF) in addition to matrix flow. So far no operationally used snow model has explicitly accounted for PF. The new approach is compared to existing water transport models and validated against in situ data from sprinkling and natural rain-on-snow (ROS) events. Our work demonstrates the benefit of considering PF in modelling hourly snowpack runoff, especially during ROS conditions.