Since 1990 the project ‘Climate Change in the Arid Andes’ has been focusing on past climate and environmental conditions in the high mountain range of the north Chilean Andes (18 S– 28 S). The extreme aridity of this region is shown by the absence of glaciers, even at the highest altitudes above 6700 m a.s.l. More knowledge of the present climatic situation is needed to interpret the proxy data...

1 Recent studies demonstrated the sensitivity of northern forest ecosystems to changes in the amount and duration of snow cover at annual to decadal time scales. However, the consequences of snowfall variability remain uncertain for ecological variables operating at longer time scales, especially the distributions of forest communities. 2 The Great Lakes region of North America offers a unique ...

Daily snow water equivalent records from the snowpack telemetry archive are used to assess spatiotemporal characteristics of large snowfall events over the montane western United States. The largest mean annual (leading) events are found in the Pacific Northwest and Sierra Nevada. The mean leading event lasting up to 72 hours typically accounts for 10-23% of the water equivalent of annual snowf...

A new product, the Pan-Arctic Snowfall Reconstruction (PASR), is developed to address the problem of cold season precipitation gauge biases for the 1940–99 period. The method used to create the PASR is different from methods used in other large-scale precipitation data products and has not previously been employed for estimating pan-arctic snowfall. The NASA Interannual-to-Seasonal Prediction P...

Climate change has a complex effect on snow at the regional scale. The change in snow patterns under climate change remains unknown for certain regions. Here, we used high spatiotemporal resolution snow-related variables simulated by a weather research and forecast model (WRF) including snowfall, snow water equivalent and snow depth along with fractional snow cover (FSC) data extracted from Mod...

There is an increasing interest in examining long-term trends in measures of snow climatology. An examination of the U.S. daily snowfall records for 1900–2004 revealed numerous apparent inconsistencies. For example, long-term snowfall trends among neighboring lake-effect stations differ greatly from insignificant to 100% century . Internal inconsistencies in the snow records, such as a lack of ...

Spaceborne microwave remote sensing of precipitation at higher latitudes is investigated using an integrated observational and modeling approach. An ice particle model database containing microwave properties of twenty-five ice habits is developed and serves as the centerpiece of both a radar-based snowfall retrieval scheme and a combined active/passive modeling system. Equivalent radar reflect...