


COLUMBUS, Ohio-There's a lot more snow piling up in the mountains of North America than anyone knew, according to a first-of-its-kind study.

Scientists have revised an estimate of snow volume for the entire continent, and they've discovered that snow accumulation in a typical year is 50 percent higher than previously thought.


Most of the snow accumulates atop the Canadian Rockies and 10 other mountain ranges. And while these mountains compose only a quarter of the continent's land area, they hold 60 percent of the snow, the researchers determined.


"Our big result was that there's a lot more snow in the mountains than we previously thought," she said. "That suggests that mountain snow plays a much larger role in the continental water budget than we knew."

It's currently impossible to directly measure how much water is on the planet, said Michael Durand, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. "It's extremely important to know-not just so we can make estimates of available fresh water, but also because we don't fully understand Earth's water cycle."


But exactly how much water there is-or what proportion of it falls as snow or rain-isn't precisely known. Satellites make reasonable measurements of snow on the plains where the ground is flat, though uncertainties persist even there. But mountain terrain is too unpredictable for current satellites. That's why researchers have to construct regional climate computer models to get a handle on snow accumulation at the continental scale.


So far, the project has consumed 1.8 million core-hours on NASA's Pleiades supercomputer and produced about 16 terabytes of data. On a typical laptop, the calculations would have taken about 50 years to complete.


They actually measure snow-water equivalent, the amount of water that would form if the snow melted-at about a 3-to-1 ratio. For North America, the snow-water equivalent would be around 400 cubic miles of water-enough to flood the entire continent 2.5 inches deep, or the state of Ohio 50 feet deep.


"Each of these ranges is a huge part of the climate system," Durand said, "but I don't think we realized how important the Canadian Rockies really are. We hope that by drawing attention to the importance of the mountains, this work will help spur development in understanding how mountains fit into the large-scale picture."




Their work was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Contacts: Michael Durand; [email protected]
Melissa Wrzesien; [email protected]


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Pam Frost Gorder
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