Crocus snowpack simulations across southwestern Canada and northwestern US

The simulated snowpack properties (snow water equivalent, snow depth) were obtained from the detailed snowpack model Crocus (Vionnet et al., 2012; Lafaysse et al., 2017), implemented in the SVS land surface scheme version 2 (Soil Vegetation and Snow; Garnaud et al., 2019). Snowpack simulations were carried out from 1 September 2019 to 30 June 2020 over a grid covering southwestern Canada and northwestern US at 2.5-km grid spacing. The simulations were driven by short-meteorological forecast from the High-Resolution Deterministic Prediction System (HRDPS; Milbrandt et al., 2016) combined with precipitation estimates from the Canadian Precipitation Analysis (Fortin et al., 2018). Four precipitation-phase partitioning methods (PPMs) were used to derive the liquid and solid precipitation rates from the total precipitation available in the atmospheric forcing. More details about the simulations are and the PPMS given in the readme file included in the dataset.

This dataset has been used in a study submitted to Water Resources Research (Vionnet et al, 2022).

References:

Fortin, V., Roy, G., Stadnyk, T., Koenig, K., Gasset, N., & Mahidjiba, A. (2018). Ten years of science based on the Canadian precipitation analysis: A CaPA system overview and literature review. Atmosphere-Ocean, 56(3), 178-196.

Garnaud, C., Bélair, S., Carrera, M. L., Derksen, C., Bilodeau, B., Abrahamowicz, M., ... & Vionnet, V. (2019). Quantifying snow mass mission concept trade-offs using an observing system simulation experiment. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 20(1), 155-173.

Milbrandt, J. A., Bélair, S., Faucher, M., Vallée, M., Carrera, M. L., & Glazer, A. (2016). The pan-Canadian high resolution (2.5 km) deterministic prediction system. Weather and Forecasting, 31(6), 1791-1816.

Lafaysse, M., Cluzet, B., Dumont, M., Lejeune, Y., Vionnet, V., & Morin, S. (2017). A multiphysical ensemble system of numerical snow modelling. The Cryosphere, 11(3), 1173-1198.

Vionnet, V., Brun, E., Morin, S., Boone, A., Faroux, S., Le Moigne, P., ... & Willemet, J. M. (2012). The detailed snowpack scheme Crocus and its implementation in SURFEX v7. 2. Geoscientific Model Development, 5(3), 773-791.

Vionnet, V., Verville, M., Fortin, V., Brugman, M., Abrahamowicz, M., Lemay, F., Thériault, J.M., Lafaysse M., and Milbrandt, J.A. : Snow level from post-processing of atmospheric model improves snowfall estimates and snowpack predictions in mountains, Water Resources Research, 2022, Accepted with minor revisions