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Developing A Representative Snow-Monitoring Network In A Forested Mountain Watershed, Kelly E. Gleason, Anne Nolin, Travis R. Roth

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

A challenge in establishing new ground-based stations for monitoring snowpack accumulation and ablation is to locate the sites in areas that represent the key processes affecting snow accumulation and ablation. This is especially challenging in forested montane watersheds where the combined effects of terrain, climate, and land cover affect seasonal snowpack. We present a coupled modeling approach used to objectively identify representative snow-monitoring locations in a forested watershed in the western Oregon Cascades mountain range. We used a binary regression tree (BRT) non-parametric statistical model to classify peak snow water equivalent (SWE) based on physiographic landscape characteristics in an average …