Introduction Knowledge of snow parameters is important for climatology, meteorology, hydrology, flood prevention and hydropower industry. Liquid water in a snow pack shows a dominant effect on reflection, absorption and transmission of electromagnetic waves especially in microwave region. Liquid water in snow plays a major role in metamorphism, mechanics and hydrology of snow, and in soil engin...

Anticipated future temperature changes in the mountainous U.S. Pacific Northwest will cause reduced spring snow pack, earlier melt, earlier spring peak flow and lower summer flow in transient rain-snow and snowmelt dominant river basins. In the context of managed flood control, these systematic changes are likely to disrupt the balance between flood control and reservoir refill in existing rese...

Introduction: Gullies, a class of unusually young features on Mars consisting of an alcove, a channel and a fan, were initially interpreted to have originated through processes related to the presence of liquid water, primarily through groundwater discharge [1,2]; the current metastability of liquid water on the surface of Mars generated a host of alternative explanations for the gullies [see s...

Observations show that on a mountainside the boundary between snow and rain, the snow line, is often located at an elevation hundreds of meters below its elevation in the free air upwind. The processes responsible for this mesoscale lowering of the snow line are examined in semi-idealized simulations with a mesoscale numerical model and in simpler theoretical models. Spatial variations in laten...

The bacterial flora and biomass in mountain snow from the Tateyama Mountains, Toyama Prefecture, Japan, one of the heaviest snowfall regions in the world, were analyzed by amplified ribosomal DNA restriction analysis followed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing and DNA quantification by real-time PCR. Samples of surface snow collected in various months during the melting season contained a psychrophili...

Features seen in portions of a typical midlatitude Martian impact crater show that gully formation follows a geologically recent period of midlatitude glaciation. Geological evidence indicates that, in the relatively recent past, sufficient snow and ice accumulated on the pole-facing crater wall to cause glacial flow and filling of the crater floor with debris-covered glaciers. As glaciation wa...

Dynamical subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) weather forecasting has made strides in recent years, thanks partly to better initialization and representation of physical variables in models. For instance, realistic initializations of snow and soil moisture in models yield enhanced temperature predictability on S2S time scales. Snow depth and soil moisture also mediate month-to-month persistence of ne...

We present Ku-band backscatter signatures of snow for applications to global snow monitoring with NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT) on the ADEOS satellite and the SeaWinds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite. We carried out the 1999 Alaska Snow Experiment to study the relation between Ku-band backscatter and snow physical properties. The experimental results are applied to interpret backscatter da...

The relevance of snow for climate studies is based on its physical properties, such as high surface reflectivity. Surface ultraviolet (UV) albedo is an essential parameter for various applications based on radiative transfer modeling. Here, new continuous measurements of the local UV albedo of natural Arctic snow were made at Sodankylä (6722N, 2639E, 179 m a.s.l.) during the spring of 2007. The...