Adding Utility to Automated Snow Depth Measurements Across a Number of Remote Sites in Subarctic and Arctic Alaska

Abstract:

For over twenty years now, ultrasonic distance sensors have been commercially available and commonly used to characterize snow depth. Ryan et al. did thorough work (2008) to compare their performance with manual measurements by the National Weather Service field offices. However, in remote and often wind-blown natural conditions beyond the extent of forest, extracting an accurate and precise snow depth at high temporal resolution remains a complex and time intensive process, with often limited utility for integration with numerical models. Research presented here focuses on a number of sites operated cooperatively with the US Department of Energy’s NGEE-Arctic program on the Seward Peninsula in Western Alaska (USA). At these locations, snow depth has been recorded for at least three and up to twelve winters at a five-minute logging interval. Since 2016, intensive end-of-winter field campaigns have worked to capture spatial variability of snow depth, snow water equivalent, and density across one of these catchments (see Bennett et al. for additional details on basin). Complementing these observational data series, we introduce several new algorithms and synthesis data sets which add context to the ultrasonic snow depth data and may allow other remote, rarely visited continuous snow depth recording stations to be incorporated into larger scale modeling efforts.

Wendy Ryan et al. 2008:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/jtech/article/25/5/667/3106/Evaluation-of-Ultrasonic-Snow-Depth-Sensors-for-U