Difficulties in Determining Snowpack Sublimation in Complex Terrain at the Macroscale

In many mountainous regions, snowmelt is an essential component of water resources and ecosystem function and snow sublimation often leads to water loss from the given drainage basin. Previous investigators have developed numerous modeling and measurement techniques to quantify sublimation, illustrating high variability over short distances. The complexities of modeling and measuring sublimation limit investigations to smaller scales in complex terrain and therefore the effects that microscale controls on sublimation have at the macroscale are not well understood. A key component of microscale variability, vegetation cover, can change on short time scales relative to other components (e.g., slope, aspect, and elevation) in response to natural and anthropogenic influences such as land use practice, drought, wildfire, insect infestation, and climate change. Basic vegetation-sublimation relationships may vary within a given drainage basin, by climate type, seasonally, and interannually. It is therefore particularly important to advance understanding of vegetation effects on sublimation at the macroscale.