Strategies and Best Practices for Monitoring  Seasonal Snow Cover Composition

• Seasonal snow covers up to 45 million km^2 every winter. As such, it represents a major interface between the Earth's surface and atmosphere. It also offers a convenient sampling medium to monitor water isotopes in solid precipitation and the net deposition of a wide variety of atmospheric species, including nutrients, organic compounds (OCs), trace metals, dust, black carbon (BC), and many others. Impurities such as dust and BC are light-absorbing and as such can modify the radiative properties of snow, while other atmospheric species such as OCs or certain metals can adversely affect the aquatic environment and drinking water quality in meltwater-fed basins. Systematic monitoring of seasonal snowpack composition may therefore offer a way of supplementing direct observations of air and precipitation chemistry. It may also lend itself well to certain "citizen science" activities, provided a set of standardized protocols can be adopted, and an adequate platform for data collection and sharing be established. In recent years, some recommendations to this effect were made by the snow science community through the IASC Cryosphere Working Group, the WMO Global Cryosphere Watch and EU Harmosnow initiative. The purpose of this presentation is to stimulate a continued discussion of the merits, challenges and caveats of establishing a network of coordinated snowpack composition observations. Examples of existing or recently-developed monitoring protocols for snowpacks in Arctic and montane regions will be presented and discussed.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap -- Naturgeografi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Earth and Related Environmental Sciences -- Physical Geography (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Snow

climatology

precipitation

chemistry

aerosols

Earth Science with specialization in Physical Geography

Geovetenskap med inriktning mot naturgeografi

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)