This work compares the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and Hadley Centre Regional Model (HadRM) simulations with the observed daily maximum and minimum temperature (Tmax and Tmin) and precipitation at Historical Climatology Network (HCN) stations over the U.S. Pacific Northwest for 2003–07. The WRF and HadRM runs were driven by...
In western North America, snow provides crucial storage of winter precipitation, effectively transferring water from the relatively wet winter season to the typically dry summers. Manual and telemetered measurements of spring snow-pack, corroborated by a physically based hydrologic model, are examined here for climate-driven fluctuations and trends during the period...
A physically based hydrology model is used to produce time series for the period 1916–2003 of evapotranspiration (ET), runoff, and soil moisture (SM) over the western United States from which long-term trends are evaluated. The results show that trends in ET in spring and summer are determined primarily by trends...
The decrease in mountain snowpack associated with global warming is difficult to estimate in the presence of the large year-to-year natural variability in observations of snow-water equivalent (SWE). A more robust approach for inferring the impacts of global warming is to estimate the temperature sensitivity (λ) of spring snowpack and...