Snow Distribution Evaluation in High Mountain Asia: Observations and Modeling

Snow in mountainous areas changes fast in space and time, resulting in strong spatial and temporal heterogeneity, which highly impacts the radiation balance and hydrological cycle. However, gaps still exist between observations and modeling due to serval issues. One issue is the absence of wind drifting and blowing snow (WDBS) processes in most mesoscale atmospheric models. A newly developed WDBS-coupled atmospheric model, CRYOWRF, was used to evaluate the snow distribution in the Tarim area and Namco area, to assess the impact of WDBS and its sublimation on the snow distribution. Field observations were also carried out to validate the modeling, which showed good agreement.  A highly temporal heterogeneity pattern is shown in High Mountain Asia due to the strong blowing snow sublimation. Our works prove that CRYOWRF has a good performance in High Mountain Asia.