Counting marmots…
Snow is a vital part of water resources, but sublimation may remove 10% to 90% of snowfall from the system. Due to a critical lack of reliable direct measurements of snow sublimation, we do not fully understand the physics that govern current rates of sublimation, let alone how those amounts might change with the climate. We propose to deploy NSF's Integrated Surface Flux System (ISFS) for winter 2022-2023 in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy's Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) at the Kettle Ponds site in the East River Watershed, Colorado. SAIL will measure vertical and horizontally distributed wind fields from radiosondes, a radar wind profiler, a doppler lidar, and distributed meteorological stations. We plan to deploy the ISFS system to provide surface flux observations at multiple levels to better understand how basin-scale wind fields interact with surface turbulence and fluxes. These measurements, combined with energy and mass balance observations and terrestrial lidar scans of the evolving snowfield, will provide benchmarks of the most reliable approaches to measuring snow sublimation in different conditions and improve understanding of sensible and latent heat fluxes in complex terrain.