Snow Sublimation in Mountain Environments and Its Sensitivity to Forest Disturbance and Climate Warming Water Resources Research

Snow sublimation is an important component of the snow mass balance, but the spatial and temporal variability of this process is not well understood in mountain environments. This study combines aprocess-based snow model (SnowModel) with eddy covariance (EC) measurements to investigate (1) the spatio-temporal variability of simulated snow sublimation with respect to station observations, (2) the contribution of snow sublimation to the ablation of the snowpack, and (3) the sensitivity and response ofsnow sublimation to bark beetle-induced forest mortality and climate warming across the north-central Colorado Rocky Mountains. EC-based observations of snow sublimation compared well with simulated snow sublimation at stations dominated by surface and canopy sublimation, but blowing snow sublimationin alpine areas was not well captured by the EC instrumentation. Water balance calculations provided an important validation of simulated sublimation at the watershed scale. Simulated snow sublimation across