Publications related to Snow | EPFL Graph Search

Influence of sun cups on surface albedo of wet Alpine snowpack

Michael Lehning, Mathias Thierry Pierre Bavay, Francesca Carletti

In high elevation Alpine areas, characterised by high snow accumulation and radiation-driven melt processes, the formation of peculiar ablation features called sun cups can be observed. Sun cups likely influence the energy and mass balance of the wet snowp ...

2024

Turbulence in the Strongly Heterogeneous Near-Surface Boundary Layer over Patchy Snow

Michael Lehning, Dylan Stewart Reynolds, Michael Haugeneder

The near-surface boundary layer above patchy snow cover in mountainous terrain is characterized by a highly complex interplay of various flows on multiple scales. In this study, we present data from a comprehensive field campaign that cover a period of 21 ...

2024

Impact of intercepted and sub-canopy snow microstructure on snowpack response to rain-on-snow events under a boreal canopy

Michael Lehning, Adrien Michel, Nander Wever, Daniel Nadeau, Benjamin Bouchard

Rain-on-snow events can cause severe flooding in snow-dominated regions. These are expected to become more frequent in the future as climate change shifts the precipitation from snowfall to rainfall. However, little is known about how winter rainfall inter ...

2024

Good enough: Intermediate complexity atmospheric models improve the representation of processes affecting seasonal snow

Dylan Stewart Reynolds

Snow plays a crucial role in processes regulating ecosystems, the climate, and human development. Mountain snowpack in particular has great relevance for downstream communities. Knowledge about the distribution and properties of the snowpack thus help in p ...

EPFL2024

Snowfall deposition in mountainous terrain: a statistical downscaling scheme from high-resolution model data on simulated topographies

Michael Lehning

One of the primary causes of non-uniform snowfall deposition on the ground in mountainous regions is the preferential deposition of snow, which results from the interaction of near-surface winds with topography and snow particles. However, producing high-r ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Understanding snow saltation parameterizations: lessons from theory, experiments and numerical simulations

Michael Lehning, Armin Sigmund, Daniela Brito Melo

Drifting and blowing snow are important features in polar and high mountain regions. They control the surface mass balance in windy conditions and influence sublimation of snow and ice surfaces. Despite their importance, model representations in weather an ...

2024

Intermediate complexity atmospheric modeling in complex terrain: is it right?

Michael Lehning, Dylan Stewart Reynolds, Michael Haugeneder

Dynamic downscaling of atmospheric forcing data to the hectometer resolution has shown increases in accuracy for landsurface models, but at great computational cost. Here we present a validation of a novel intermediate complexity atmospheric model, HICAR, ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

A seasonal snowpack model forced with dynamically downscaled forcing data resolves hydrologically relevant accumulation patterns

Michael Lehning, Dylan Stewart Reynolds, Tobias Jonas

The Mountain snowpack stores months of winter precipitation at high elevations, supplying snowmelt to lowland areas in drier seasons for agriculture and human consumption worldwide. Accurate seasonal predictions of the snowpack are thus of great importance ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Turbulence and Heat exchange in the Near-Surface Boundary Layer over Patchy Snow

Michael Haugeneder

The atmospheric layer adjacent to the earth's surface is of crucial importance for weather models due to the exchange of energy between the surface and the atmosphere. This exchange is dependent on the various surface properties and influences the state of ...

EPFL2024

Multi-year time series of daily solute and isotope measurements from three Swiss pre-Alpine catchments

Jana Freiin von Freyberg

Time series analyses of solute concentrations in streamwater and precipitation are powerful tools for unraveling the interplay of hydrological and biogeochemical processes at the catchment scale. While such datasets are available for many sites around the ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Highly Hygroscopic Aerosols Facilitate Summer and Early‐Autumn Cloud Formation at Extremely Low Concentrations Over the Central Arctic Ocean

Julia Schmale, Andrea Baccarini

Arctic clouds are sensitive to atmospheric particles since these are sometimes in such low concentrations that clouds cannot always form under supersaturated water vapor conditions. This is especially true in the late summer, when aerosol concentrations ar ...

2024

On the importance of the humidity flux for the surface mass balance in the accumulation zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Sonja Wahl

It is highly uncertain how the humidity flux between the snow surface and the atmosphere contributes to the surface mass balance (SMB) of the interior Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). Due to sparse observations, evaluations of the simulated humidity flux are li ...

Copernicus Gesellschaft Mbh2024

Snow Loss Into Leads in Arctic Sea Ice: Minimal in Typical Wintertime Conditions, but High During a Warm and Windy Snowfall Event

Julia Schmale, Marc Schneebeli Zeugin, Markus Frey

The amount of snow on Arctic sea ice impacts the ice mass budget. Wind redistribution of snow into open water in leads is hypothesized to cause significant wintertime snow loss. However, there are no direct measurements of snow loss into Arctic leads. We m ...

2023

Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Snow on Central Arctic Sea Ice and its Implications

David Nicholas Wagner

This thesis presents a comprehensive investigation of the interaction between precipitation and wind-induced erosion and deposition of snow on Arctic sea ice. The study uses observations from the 2019-2020 MOSAiC expedition and makes use of the 3D snow cov ...

EPFL2023

An empirical model to calculate snow depth from daily snow water equivalent: SWE2HS 1.0

Adrien Michel, Tobias Jonas

Many methods exist to model snow densification in order to calculate the depth of a single snow layer or the depth of the total snow cover from its mass. Most of these densification models need to be tightly integrated with an accumulation and melt model a ...

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH2023

Convection of snow: when and why does it happen?

Michael Lehning, Mahdi Jafari

Convection of water vapor in snowpacks is supposed to have a major impact on snow density and microstructure profiles with strong implications for the thermal regime and snow stability. However, the process has never been directly measured and only recentl ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Snow transport in extreme environments: from small to large scale modeling

Daniela Brito Melo

The cold regions on Earth, such as the polar and high mountain regions, are snow covered for at least a part of the year. These snow-covered surfaces are highly dynamic, particularly under the influence of strong winds. The aeolian or wind-driven transport ...

EPFL2023

CRYOWRF—Model Evaluation and the Effect of Blowing Snow on the Antarctic Surface Mass Balance

Varun Sharma, Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber

The surface mass balance (SMB) of large polar ice sheets and of snow and ice surfaces in general are incompletely understood because of the complexity of processes involved. One such process, drifting and blowing snow, has only been considered in a very si ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2023

Assessing sublimation during snow transport and sublimation effects on the isotopic composition of water vapor

Armin Sigmund

Sublimation influences the water storage in snow covers and glaciers, which is important for water use and projections of the sea level rise. Yet, it is challenging to quantify sublimation for large areas or in conditions of snow transport. In-situ measure ...

EPFL2023

Snow-Atmosphere Humidity Exchange at the Ice Sheet Surface Alters Annual Mean Climate Signals in Ice Core Records

Sonja Wahl

Surface processes alter the water stable isotope signal of the surface snow after deposition. However, it remains an open question to which extent surface post-depositional processes should be considered when inferring past climate information from ice cor ...

Amer Geophysical Union2023