Snow sensitivity to temperature and precipitation change during compound cold–hot and wet–dry seasons in the Pyrenees

• Main Authors: Bonsoms, Josep, López-Moreno, Juan I., Alonso-González, Esteban
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España), Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (España), CSIC - Unidad de Recursos de Información Científica para la Investigación (URICI)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: European Geosciences Union 2023
• Subjects: The Cryosphere
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/346165; https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-1307-2023; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100004837

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. The Mediterranean Basin has experienced one of the highest warming rates on earth during the last few decades, and climate projections predict water scarcity in the future. Mid-latitude Mediterranean mountain areas, such as the Pyrenees, play a key role in the hydrological resources for the highly populated lowland areas. However, there are still large uncertainties about the impact of climate change on snowpack in the high mountain ranges of this region. Here, we perform a snow sensitivity to temperature and precipitation change analysis of the Pyrenean snowpack (1980–2019 period) using five key snow–climatological indicators. We analyzed snow sensitivity to temperature and precipitation during four different compound weather conditions (cold–dry (CD), cold–wet (CW), warm–dry (WD), and warm–wet (WW)) at low elevations (1500 m), mid elevations (1800 m), and high elevations (2400 m) in the Pyrenees. In particular, we forced a physically based energy and mass balance snow model (FSM2), with validation by ground-truth data, and applied this model to the entire range, with forcing of perturbed reanalysis climate data for the period 1980 to 2019 as the baseline. The FSM2 model results successfully reproduced the observed snow depth (HS) values (R2>0.8), with relative root mean square error and mean absolute error values less than 10 % of the observed HS values. Overall, the snow sensitivity to temperature and precipitation change decreased with elevation and increased towards the eastern Pyrenees. When the temperature increased progressively at 1 ∘C intervals, the largest seasonal HS decreases from the baseline were at +1 ∘C. A 10 % increase in precipitation counterbalanced the temperature increases (≤1 ∘C) at high elevations during the coldest months because temperature was far from the isothermal 0 ∘C conditions. The maximal seasonal HS and peak HS max reductions were during WW seasons, and the minimal reductions ...