Snow depth time series Generation: Effective simulation at multiple time scales

Abstract

Snow depth (SD) is a crucial variable of the water, energy, and nutrient cycles, impacting water quantity and quality, the occurrence of floods and droughts, snow-related hazards, and sub-surface ecological functions. As a result, quantifying SD dynamics is crucial for several scientific and practical applications. Ground measurements of SD provide information at sparse locations, and physical global model simulations provide information at relatively coarse spatial resolutions. An approach to complement this information is using stochastic models that generate time series of hydroclimatic variables, preserving their statistical properties in a computationally-effective manner. However, stochastic generation methods to produce SD time series exclusively do not exist in the literature. Here, we apply a stochastic model to produce synthetic daily SD time series trained by 448 stations in Canada. We show that the model captures key statistical properties of the observed records, including the daily distributions of zero and non-zero SD, temporal clustering (i.e., autocorrelation), and seasonal patterns. The model also excelled in capturing the observed higher-order L-moments at multiple temporal scales, with biases between simulated and observed L-skewness and L-kurtosis within ($-$0.1, +0.1) for 93.0 % and 98.3 % of the stations, respectively. The stochastic modelling approach introduced here advances the generation of SD time series, which are needed to develope Earth-system models and assess the risk of snowmelt flooding that lead to severe damage and fatalities.