Snow Water Equivalent in the Western US (1982 - 2017)

These data describes changes in western US snow water equivalent (SWE) over the 1982–2017 water years. This includes observations of SWE from the NRCS SNOTEL network, the parameters used to fit the observed annual cycles of SWE to a gamma distribution PDF, and the parameters needed to recreate western US SWE on an equal angle grid. SWE values for the beginning of the water years in the fitted and fitted+interpolated values are overestimated. Thus, these data do not constitute a continuous time series from one year to the next. This is due to the fact that the tail of the Gamma distribution PDF does not drop off quickly enough to capture the rise in SWE at the beginning of the water year.