A Land Cover‐Based Snow Cover Representation for Distributed Hydrologic Models

Abstract

A snow cover depletion curve (SDC) summarizes the relationship between snow cover distribution and an average snow cover property, such as depth or water equivalent, for a given area. Snow cover depletion curves have been developed for, and applied in, hydrological models on a watershed or elevation zone basis. However, land cover‐;based SDCs are not prominent in the literature. For this study the areal distribution of snow cover for dominant land cover units was measured during the winters of 1991 and 1992 in the Laurel Creek watershed in southern Ontario, Canada. On the basis of these data a general model for land cover‐;based SDCs is developed for these land cover units, namely, short grass, ploughed fields, and deciduous forests. This model is derived from the three‐parameter lognormal distribution, which is shown to characterize the areal depletion curves of the land cover units studied. The SDCs based on this new model provide a formal distributed snow cover representation that can be used in vegetation‐based distributed hydrological models requiring accurate spatial representations of snow cover attributes.