An empirical model to calculate snow depth from daily snow water equivalent: SWE2HS 1.0

Johannes Aschauer, Adrien Michel, Tobias Jonas, and Christoph Marty

Data sets

The Kühtai dataset: 25 years of lysimetric, snow pillow and meteorological measurements Juraj Parajka https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.556110

Cryobs-Clim-CDP/Col de Porte: a meterological and snow observatory Cryobs-Clim-CDP https://doi.org/10.17178/CRYOBSCLIM.CDP.2018

SWE2HS model calibration and validation data Johannes Aschauer and Christoph Marty https://doi.org/10.16904/envidat.394

Model code and software

swe2hs Python package (v1.0.3) Johannes Aschauer https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7228066

Code to recreate figures in Aschauer, J., Michel, A., Jonas, T., and Marty, C. (2023) Johannes Aschauer https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8002941

Short summary

Snow water equivalent is the mass of water stored in a snowpack. Based on exponential settling functions, the empirical snow density model SWE2HS is presented to convert time series of daily snow water equivalent into snow depth. The model has been calibrated with data from Switzerland and validated with independent data from the European Alps. A reference implementation of SWE2HS is available as a Python package.