Dominant modes of variation in the annual progression of snow accumulation and melt in the Sierra Nevada

Snow in the Sierra Nevada is an important source of water for California. Due to advances in technology, the environmental sciences are more commonly taking measurements from continuous processes, and sample measurements of snow water equivalent (SWE) from snow pillows are one such example. Snow pillows provide daily samples from the continuous SWE yearly profile if SWE measurements are viewed as a continuous function of time. We examine the dominant modes of variation in the timing of snowpack events using functional principal component analysis. Additionally, we examine the associations between the dominant modes of variation with large-scale climate indices and spatial location.