Impacts of climate change on snow accumulation and melting processes over mountainous regions in Northern California during the 21st century

Date

2019-10-01

Author

Ishida, K.
Ohara, N.
Ercan, Ali
Jang, S.
Trinh, T.
Kavvas, M. L.
Carr, K.
Anderson, M. L.

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

154
views

0
downloads

A point-location-based analysis of future climate change impacts on snow accumulation and melting processes was conducted over three study watersheds in Northern California during a 90-year future period by means of snow regime projections. The snow regime projections were obtained by means of a physically-based snow model with dynamically downscaled future climate projections. Then, atmospheric and snow-related variables, and their interrelations during the 21st century were investigated to reveal future climate change impacts on snow accumulation and melting processes. The analysis shows large reductions in snow water equivalent (SWE), snowfall to precipitation (S/P) ratio, and snowmelt through the 21st century. Timing of the peak of the SWE and snowmelt will also change in the future. Meanwhile, the analysis in this study shows that air temperature rise will affect, but will not dominate the future change in snowmelt over the study watersheds. This result implies the importance of considering atmospheric variables other than air temperature, such as precipitation, shortwave radiation, relative humidity, and wind speed even if these variables will not clearly change during the 21st century. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Subject Keywords

Future projections, Snow/precipitation ratio, Snow water equivalent, Air temperature, Snow accumulation and melt, SIERRA-NEVADA, WATER-RESOURCES, SENSITIVITY, ENERGY, MODEL, SIMULATION, SCENARIOS, BALANCE, RUNOFF, COVER

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/100246

Journal

SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.05.255

Collections

Department of Civil Engineering, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Analysis of future climate change impacts on snow distribution over mountainous watersheds in Northern California by means of a physically-based snow distribution model Ishida, K.; Ercan, Ali; Trinh, T.; Kavvas, M. L.; Ohara, N.; Carr, K.; Anderson, M. L. (2018-12-01) The impacts of climate change on snow distribution through the 21st century were investigated over three mountainous watersheds in Northern California by means of a physically-based snow distribution model. The future climate conditions during a 90-year future period from water year 2010 to 2100 were obtained from 13 future climate projection realizations from two GCMs (ECHAM5 and CCSM3) based on four SRES scenarios (A1B, A1FI, A2, and B1). The 13 future climate projection realizations were dynamically down...
Trend analysis of watershed-scale precipitation over Northern California by means of dynamically-downscaled CMIP5 future climate projections Ishida, K.; Gorguner, M.; Ercan, Ali; Trinh, T.; Kavvas, M. L. (2017-08-01) The impacts of climate change on watershed-scale precipitation through the 21st century were investigated over eight study watersheds in Northern California based on dynamically downscaled CMIP5 future climate projections from three GCMs (CCSM4, HadGEM2-ES, and MIROC5) under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 future climate scenarios. After evaluating the modeling capability of the WRF model, the six future climate projections were dynamically downscaled by means of the WRF model over Northern California at 9 km grid re...
Trend analysis of watershed-scale annual and seasonal precipitation in Northern California based on dynamically downscaled future climate projections Ishida, K.; Ercan, Ali; Trinh, T.; Jang, S.; Kavvas, M. L.; Ohara, N.; Chen, Z. Q.; Kure, S.; Dib, A. (2020-03-01) Impact of future climate change on watershed-scale precipitation was investigated over Northern California based on future climate projections by means of the dynamical downscaling approach. Thirteen different future climate projection realizations from two general circulation models (GCMs: ECHAM5 and CCSM3) based on four emission scenarios (SRES A1B, A1FI, A2, and B1) were dynamically downscaled to 9-km resolution grids over eight watersheds in Northern California for a period of 90 water years (2010-2100)...
Special issue on remote sensing of snow and its applications Arslan, Ali Nadir; Akyürek, Sevda Zuhal (2019-06-01) Snow cover is an essential climate variable directly affecting the Earth's energy balance. Snow cover has a number of important physical properties that exert an influence on global and regional energy, water, and carbon cycles. Remote sensing provides a good understanding of snow cover and enable snow cover information to be assimilated into hydrological, land surface, meteorological, and climate models for predicting snowmelt runoff, snow water resources, and to warn about snow-related natural hazards. Th...
Impacts of climate change on water resources on eastern mountainous region of Turkey Güventürk, Abdülkadir; Yücel, İsmail; Department of Civil Engineering (2013) Temperature and precipitation are the most important indicators of climate change. Especially for the basins fed by snow, the shifts of melting to earlier times, affects the streamflow. Increase in temperature causes to shifts of melting of snow to shift to earlier times so that hydrologic regime of the river system changes, and leads to changes in climatic conditions of the region. In this study the shifts of snow melting times are analyzed for the selected 15 streamflow stations located in Euphrates, Tigr...

Citation Formats

K. Ishida et al., “Impacts of climate change on snow accumulation and melting processes over mountainous regions in Northern California during the 21st century,” SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT, vol. 685, pp. 104–115, 2019, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/100246.