ENERGY BALANCE SNOWMELT MODELING FOR DATA-POOR BASINS

摘要

Few investigations have been made into modeling snowmelt in data-poor basins; hence, adegree-day method is widely used and is routinely justified under the auspices that energy-balancemodels require too many input data. To test this claim, we investigated the utility of merely adopting afull energy approach to model snowmelt. This study first developed so-called “full energy balance snowmodel” to simulate snowmelt at four sites located in Japan and the USA. The results showed very goodagreement between observed and predicted snow water equivalent, R~2>0.95. We duplicated thesimulations using the approximated version of the model that requires only air temperature and windspeed as input data. Although the original model corresponds better, the performance of its simplifiedversion can be evaluated as good, R~2>0.9. These results provide significant information for thedevelopment of appropriate approximations in energy balance snowmelt modeling.