Chapter 14 Recent Studies on the Climatology and Modeling of Blowing Snow in the Mackenzie River Basin

• Main Authors: Stephen J. Déry, M. K. Yau
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Mackenzie River; Mackenzie river; Tundra
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.488.4409; http://nhg.unbc.ca/publicationfiles/Book.pdf

Abstract This chapter presents a multi-scale analysis of the contribution of blow-ing snow to the hydrometeorology of the Mackenzie River Basin (MRB). A cli-matology of adverse wintertime weather events demonstrates that blowing snow events are rare within the forested sections of the MRB but become more frequent in the northern parts of the Basin covered by tundra, which experience the largest impacts of blowing snow transport and sublimation due to large-scale processes. A parameterization for blowing snow sublimation based on the PIEKTUK-D model and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis (ERA-15) data is used to determine that the combined processes of surface and blowing snow sublimation deplete 29 mm yr-1 snow water equivalent, or about 7 % of the watershed’s annual precipitation. This study provides only a first-order estimate of the contribution of surface sublimation and blowing snow to the MRB surface mass balance because of limitations with the dataset and some uncertainties in the blowing snow process. 1