Seminar by: Federico Covi (UiO)
Measuring snow water equivalent using frozen lakes
Abstract: Mountain snowfall is poorly observed, leading to large uncertainties and biases in weather models and therefore in our knowledge of water resources that are important to hundreds of millions of people.
We present a novel set of observations from more than 30 sites in the Alps, Himalayas, Rockies, Finland, Greenland and Southern Ocean Islands that overcome key limitations of the conventional instruments that are routinely used to measure falling or accumulating snow water equivalent. We describe how our method uses frozen lakes as sensing surfaces, avoiding notable measurement biases of pluviometers and snow pillows and, most importantly, covering a much larger surface area. The large scale of our lakes makes them comparable to the grid scale of operational weather models, which has allowed us to test their skill in representing mountain precipitation.
We illustrate the instrument design as well as lessons learned from its deployment, and we present examples from these sites, with a particular focus on Austria’s Rofental INARCH catchment. Finally, this unique repository of snowfall measurements has also enabled us to produce a snowfall-optimised version of the atmosphere-only version of the UK Met Office Model (MetUM) at a spatial resolution of 1.5 km with the MetUM able to accurately simulate both the timing and amounts of snowfall observed.
Federico Covi, was fomerly a Postdoc at Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, now a Mountain Snow Scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
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The GeoHyd seminars are normally held in Auditorium 2 in the Geology Building, Blindern (map) but it is also possible to follow some of the seminars on Zoom.
Videolink to the lectures will be sent to the e-mail list geohyd-alle@geo and geohyd-info@geo. If you want to subscribe to the geohyd-info@geo mailing list send an email to Anita Sørlie.
About the seminar series
The talks in GeoHyd Lunch Seminar Series are offered by the Section for Geography and Hydrology (GeoHyd), Dept. of Geosciences, University of Oslo. The seminars are announced as lunch seminars so bring your lunch if you want to.
The seminars are open for everyone interested, and especially students are welcome.
The Lunch Seminar Team
– Anita and Chong-Yu