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How well do we characterize snow storage in High Mountain Asia?
  • +1
  • Yufei Liu,
  • Yiwen Fang,
  • Dongyue Li,
  • Steven A Margulis
Yufei Liu
University of California, Los Angeles
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Yiwen Fang
University of California, Los Angeles
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Dongyue Li
University of California Los Angeles
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Steven A Margulis
University of California Los Angeles

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Abstract

Accurate characterization of peak snow water storage in High Mountain Asia (HMA) is essential for assessing the water supply to over one billion downstream residents. Currently, such characterization still relies on modeling due to the measurement scarcity. Here, eight global snow products were examined over HMA using a newly developed High Mountain Asia Snow Reanalysis (HMASR) dataset as a reference. The focus of intercomparison was on peak annual snow storage, the first-order determinant of warm-season water availability in snow-dominated basins. Across eight products the climatological peak storage over HMA was found to be 161 km3 ± 102 km3 with an average 33% underestimation relative to HMASR. The inter-product variability in cumulative snowfall (335 km3 ± 148 km3) explains the majority (>80%) of peak snow storage uncertainty, while significant snowfall loss to ablation during accumulation season (51% ± 9%) also reveals the critical role of ablation processes on peak snow storage.