Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Gridded Snow Water Equivalent Reconstruction For Utah Using Forest Inventory And Analysis Tree-Ring Data, Daniel Barandiaran, Shih-Yu (Simon) Wang, R. Justin Derose

Plants, Soils, and Climate Faculty Publications

Snowpack observations in the Intermountain West are sparse and short, making them difficult for use in depicting past variability and extremes. This study presents a reconstruction of April 1 snow water equivalent (SWE) for the period of 1850–1989 using increment cores collected by the U.S. Forest Service, Interior West Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA). In the state of Utah, SWE was reconstructed for 38 snow course locations using a combination of standardized tree-ring indices derived from both FIA increment cores and publicly available tree-ring chronologies. These individual reconstructions were then interpolated to a 4-km grid using an objective analysis …