Gridded North American monthly snow depth and snow water equivalent for GCM evaluation

Abstract Evaluation of snow cover in GCMs has been hampered by a lack of reliable gridded estimates of snow water equivalent (SWE) at continental scales. In order to address this gap, a snow depth analysis scheme developed by Brasnett (1999) and employed operationally at the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC), was applied to generate a 0.3° latitude/longitude grid of monthly mean snow depth and corresponding estimated water equivalent for North America to evaluate GCM snow cover simulations for the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project II (AMIP II) for the period 1979–96. Approximately 8000 snow depth observations per day were obtained from U.S. cooperative stations and Canadian climate stations for input to the analysis. The first‐guess field used a simple snow accumulation, aging and melt model driven by 6‐hourly values of air temperature and precipitation from the European Centre for Medium‐range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) ERA‐15 Reanalysis with extensions from the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) operational data archive. The gridded snow depth and estimated SWE results agree well with available independent in situ and satellite data over mid‐latitudinal regions of the continent, and the snow depth climatology exhibited several improvements over Foster and Davy (1988). The monthly snow depth and estimated SWE climatologies are available for downloading from the Canadian Cryospheric Information Network (http://www.ccin.ca).