Snow Drought Risk and Susceptibility - Western United States and Southwestern Canada

These five files are rasters of snow drought risk (3 files) and susceptibility (2 files) over the mountain and inter-mountain regions of western United States and southwestern Canada. <br>The snow drought risk rasters (risk_dry.asc, risk_warm.asc, risk_warm_dry.asc) correspond to the dry snow drought risk, warm snow drought risk, and warm and dry snow drought risk. Risk is calculated as the mean severity (fraction below long-term [1951-2000] peak snow water equivalent [SWE] mean) multiplied by the frequency (fraction of total years [n = 63]). Thus, snow drought risk in each raster has units of fractional deficit per year and is equal to the expected annual deficit in peak SWE for each snow drought type.<br>The susceptibility rasters (susceptibility.asc, susceptibility_plus2degC.asc) contain the categorical ranking of temperature-related snow drought susceptibility over the mountain and inter-mountain western United States and southwestern Canada. The susceptibility.asc file represents the historical susceptibility (1951-2000) and the susceptibility_plus2degC.asc file represents the susceptibility under 2 degrees of warming (relative to 1951-2000). Raster values correspond to susceptibility rankings as follows: 0 = negligible, 1 = low, 2 = medium, 3 = high.<br>All rasters are in ESRI Ascii (.asc) format and were created with the "raster" package in R. Resolution is 1/16 degree. Extent: xmin = -125; xmax = -100; ymin = 30; ymax = 53.<br>For further details, see: <br>Dierauer, J.R., Allen, D.M., &amp; Whitfield, P.H. Snow drought risk and susceptibility in the western United States and southwestern Canada.