Characterization of Northern Hemisphere Snow Water Equivalent Datasets, 1981–2010

Abstract Five, daily, gridded, Northern Hemisphere snow water equivalent (SWE) datasets are analyzed over the 1981–2010 period in order to quantify the spatial and temporal consistency of satellite retrievals, land surface assimilation systems, physical snow models, and reanalyses. While the climatologies of total Northern Hemisphere snow water mass (SWM) vary among the datasets by as much as 50%, their interannual variability and daily anomalies are comparable, showing moderate to good temporal correlations (between 0.60 and 0.85) on both interannual and intraseasonal time scales. Wintertime trends of total Northern Hemisphere SWM are consistently negative over the 1981–2010 period among the five datasets but vary in strength by a factor of 2–3. Examining spatial patterns of SWE indicates that the datasets are most consistent with one another over boreal forest regions compared to Arctic and alpine regions. Additionally, the datasets derived using relatively recent reanalyses are strongly correlated with one another and show better correlations with the satellite product the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Global Snow Monitoring for Climate Research (GlobSnow) than do those using older reanalyses. Finally, a comparison of eight reanalysis datasets over the 2001–10 period shows that land surface model differences control the majority of spread in the climatological value of SWM, while meteorological forcing differences control the majority of the spread in temporal correlations of SWM anomalies.