Data analysis of snow water equivalent for test watershed in the Colorado River Basin in 2009

This resource includes the data analysis code and results using a subset of the model simulation of snow water equivalent for the watershed of Dolores River above McPhee reservoir in the Colorado River Basin from 1988 to 2010. The model used is the Utah Energy Balance model which is a physically based snow melt model.

The data analysis code used NetCDF Operator commands (http://nco.sourceforge.net). It first subsets the data from January to May, 2009 to identify the maximum snow water equivalent for each grid cell within this period and write the result to a new NetCDF file (max.nc). It then subsets the data for April 1st and 15th, 2009 (april_1.nc, april_15.nc) and evaluates the snow water equivalent difference between the two dates to create a new NetCDF file (diff.nc). This provides the analysis result for accumulation (increase) or ablation (decrease) during this period. Water managers often track such snow water equivalent changes in water supply forecasts