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WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH,
VOL. 41,
W05007,
doi:10.1029/2004WR003649,
2005
How snowpack heterogeneity affects diurnal streamflow timing
Jessica D. Lundquist
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, USA
Michael D. Dettinger
U.S. Geological Survey, La Jolla, California, USA
Abstract
Diurnal cycles of streamflow in snow-fed rivers can be used to infer the average time a water parcel spends in transit from
the top of the snowpack to a stream gauge in the river channel. This travel time, which is measured as the difference between
the hour of peak snowmelt in the afternoon and the hour of maximum discharge each day, ranges from a few hours to almost a
full day later. Travel times increase with longer percolation times through deeper snowpacks, and prior studies of small basins
have related the timing of a stream's diurnal peak to the amount of snow stored in a basin. However, in many larger basins
the time of peak flow is nearly constant during the first half of the melt season, with little or no variation between years.
This apparent self-organization at larger scales can be reproduced by employing heterogeneous observations of snow depths
and melt rates in a model that couples porous medium flow through an evolving snowpack with free surface flow in a channel.
Received 15
September
2004;
accepted 4
February
2005;
published 6
May
2005.
Keywords: snow;
streamflow timing;
stream velocity;
heterogeneity;
diurnal cycle;
Sierra Nevada.
Index Terms: 1839 Hydrology: Hydrologic scaling; 0740 Cryosphere: Snowmelt; 1860 Hydrology: Streamflow; 1847 Hydrology: Modeling; 4475 Nonlinear Geophysics: Scaling: spatial and temporal (1872, 3270, 4277).
Read Full Article (file size: 989539 bytes) Cited by
Citation: Lundquist, J. D., and M. D. Dettinger
(2005),
How snowpack heterogeneity affects diurnal streamflow timing,
Water Resour. Res.,
41,
W05007,
doi:10.1029/2004WR003649.
Copyright 2005 by the American Geophysical Union.
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