Measuring changes in snowpack SWE continuously on a landscape scale using lake water pressure

The seasonal snowpack is a globally important water resource that is notoriously difficult to measure. Existing instruments make measurements of falling or accumulating snow water equivalent (SWE) that are susceptible to bias, and most represent only a point in the landscape. Furthermore the global array of SWE sensors is too sparse and too poorly distributed to adequately constrain snow in weather and climate models. We present a new approach to monitoring snowpack SWE from time series of lake water pressure. We tested our method in the lowland Finnish Arctic and in an alpine valley and high-mountain cirque in Switzerland, and found that we could measure changes in SWE and their uncertainty through snowfalls with little bias and with an uncertainty comparable to or better than that achievable by other instruments. More importantly, our method inherently senses change over the whole lake surface, an area in this study up to 10.95 km2 or 274 million times larger than the nearest pluviometer. This large scale makes our measurements directly comparable to the grid cells of weather and climate models. We find, for example, snowfall biases of up to 100% in operational forecast models AROME-Arctic and COSMO-1. Seasonally-frozen lakes are widely distributed at high latitudes and are particularly common in mountain ranges, hence our new method is particularly well suited to the widespread, autonomous monitoring of snow-water resources in remote areas that are largely unmonitored today. This is potentially transformative in reducing uncertainty in regional precipitation and runoff in seasonally-cold climates.

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