Abstract
Hydrologic processes in snowmelt dominated systems are traditionally
measured and understood at the point scale. However, snowmelt,
sublimation, and snowfall rates exhibit significant spatial variability
across larger landscapes. These variations are influenced by local
atmospheric and terrain characteristics, which control the deviations
between small-scale measurements and areally averaged responses to
spatially heterogeneous mass and energy inputs. Appropriate upscaling
relations are needed to translate small-scale descriptions of snow
processes into constitutive relationships that are applicable at larger
scales. As a proof of concept, this study examines the temporal and
spatial variability of sublimation and snowmelt fluxes in a drainage
basin in the Canadian Rockies using machine learning methods. Raven, a
hydrological model, generates high-resolution fluxes and state variables
used to train a random forest algorithm. The random forest (RF)
algorithm is then applied to estimate coarse resolution fluxes. This
study involves estimating spatially averaged results from discretized
fine-scaled models without explicit knowledge of detailed local
response, both with and without low-order statistics of state (e.g., the
standard deviation of snow water equivalent). A series of experiments
are used to verify that the upscaling methodology can successfully
represent the impact of heterogeneity within the system. Spatially
averaged forcing estimated from the scale-appropriate machine learning
model is then incorporated into a mass balance equation at a coarse
resolution to demonstrate the efficacy of this upscaling methodology.