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Snow is a key resource for the mountain environment.  Snow is also an economic resource directly related to winter sports and activities: skiing, ski touring, hiking, i.e. a modern use of the landscape .It is also a resource for  water outflows in rivers and mountain basins. Snow constitutes a danger, when the snowpack is unstable and causes detachment; human activities can be attacked. Snow is finally important for life of the animals that inhabit the alpine areas, as it dominates their movement for the supply of food and affects their mobility.

 

 

At mid-latitudes, snowfall, accumulation and melting are important hydrological processes that regulate large percentage of the outflows of the great rivers coming down from the Alps or the Rockies and constitute a supply of water for human activities in Europe and North America. Therefore a reduction of snowfall and a lower persistence of snowy mantle, even in the high mountains, as expected from climate change, can have a significant impact on economy and ecology.

 

In various areas of scientific research, the distribution of snow cover thickness in space and time is of great importance to know and deal with human activities and animals of the past, present and future. Nowadays, in addition to historical observations of the snowpack, often sporadic,  snow hydrology provides innovative tools for mapping the snowpack. The physically based hydrological model GEOtop (Endrizzi et al, 2014)  calculates the dynamic patterns of the snowpack (accumulation, compaction, dissolution, density, height, water equivalent) through a mass balance of water and energy applied to the whole catchment area and  using meteorological observations at the hourly scale as input data, currently available in most of the Alps from the late 1980s about.

 

 

 

In particular, GEOtop (Endrizzi et al, 2014)  is a physically based hydrological model that can determine the energy flows and soil infiltration and flow in streams in a river basin. It calculates the atmosphere-surface turbulent flows, solves the equation of energy in soil and snow and then determines its temperature, even in the presence of a phase change of the water, and finally solves the equation of subsurface flow (Equation Richards 3D ) determining water content in the soil. As concerns form snow, it also calculates the accumulation of snow, the metamorphisms compression and the density of snow.

This site was created for display on the web maps of snow thickness in Val Rendena (Trentino - Italy). In future articles maps of snow cover will be displayed for a few days between 1989 and 2014. [...]

 

 

 

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