The role of snow in freshwater supply in mountainous regions and high latitudes is undeniable; however, estimating the water stored in snow and the distribution of snow cover remains a challenge. While the advent of remote sensing data, land-surface modelling, and reanalysis products have opened the opportunity for estimating snow water availability at larger scales, limited intercomparison has been made to evaluate the differences between estimates of snow variables with a greater goal of estimating regional snow water availability. In this study, we consolidate snow variables from ERA5-Land with corresponding MODIS and Canadian Meteorological Centre’s (CMC’s) snow depth and snow water equivalent products over the entire landmass of Canada and Alaska at a 25×25 km2 grid scale. We assess and quantify the differences in gridded long-term mean, standard deviation, trend, and autocorrelation and their corresponding spatial patterns from 2000 to 2020. We also examine the spatial dependencies in regional snow variables inferred by various products. Based on this consolidation and through using ERA5/MODIS estimates of snow water extent, CMC/ERA5 estimates of snow density, and CMC estimates of snow depth, we provide four estimates of the snow water availability overall drainage basins and ecozones in Canada and Alaska and study their variations in time and space. Our results not only introduce baseline estimates of snow water availability based on currently available gridded products but also provide a set of valuable insights for quantifying the total uncertainty in snow water availability in Canada and Alaska.
1125 Colonel By Dr
Ottawa ON K1S 5B6
Canada