The Cryospheric Science Group of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change (IC3) is pleased to welcome MSc candidate Phil Mann, of Wilfrid Laurier University, to present his research at our seminar this month. His presentation is entitled:
"High resolution spatial variability of snow depth and water equivalent across a patchy tundra, forest and shrub landscape"
P. Mann1, P. Marsh1, B. Walker1 and T. de Jong1
1Wilfrid Laurier University – Waterloo, Canada
In high-latitude regions, where snow is the primary type of precipitation and there is a lack of tall vegetation, blowing snow is a key component in the water budget and is the dominant process controlling end of winter snow cover distribution. At the watershed scale, deep snow drifts contribute a large percentage of total snow retained on the arctic tundra for the small percentage of area they occupy. With drifts storing a great amount of snow per area throughout the winter and spring, the impacts on streamflow and ground temperature are significant and their magnitudes are hard to measure. The purpose of this study is to use a combination of field observations of snow accumulation using traditional snow surveys, photogrammetric data collected using an unmanned aerial system (UAS) and a variety of distributed snow density measurements to calculate the percentage of total snow water equivalent (SWE) stored on the landscape.