Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Historical (2001-2013) and End-of-Century Future Climate Simulated Snowpack and Hydrometeorology for the Gallatin River, Montana and Wyoming

August 13, 2024

This data release contains output from a numerical snow simulation for a 65 kilometer (km) × 81 km model domain in parts of Montana and Wyoming, United States, encompassing the Gallatin River watershed upstream of the U.S. Geological Survey streamgage near Gallatin Gateway, MT (06043500). Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model convection-permitting and orography-resolving regional climate simulations with 4-km horizontal resolution provided the atmospheric forcing conditions to SnowModel in both a historical and future climate scenario. Two continuous, 13-water-year (2001-2013) WRF model simulations were utilized: (1) a historical climate control (CTL) simulation forced using ERA-Interim reanalysis, and (2) a future climate simulation using the pseudo-global-warming (PGW) method that uses the ERA-Interim reanalysis for the same period as (1) and adds an ensemble mean climate delta from the end of the century (2071-2100) for the most extreme 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario. The ten SnowModel simulated outputs provided in this data release include (1) air temperature (tair), (2) precipitation (prec), (3) solid precipitation (spre), (4) liquid precipitation (rpre), (5) liquid water supplied to the soil-snow interface from snowmelt (smlt), (6) snow sublimination (ssub), (7) liquid water supplied to the soil-snow or soil-air interface either from snowmelt or rainfall (roff), (8) snow depth (snod), (9) snow water equivalent depth (swed), and (10) snow density (sden). The simulations used to produce these outputs were conducted on a 30-m geospatial grid. Land cover information for the simulation was provided by the 2010 North American Land Change Monitoring System and elevation information was provided by the U.S. Geological Survey National Elevation Dataset. The historical (CTL) and future climate (PGW) simulations were conducted using annual precipitation bias correction surfaces (prec_cf), which were computed by comparing SnowModel-simulated CTL snow water equivalent to Natural Resources Conservation Service snow telemetry station (SNOTEL) observations to generate a precipitation correction that was interpolated using SnowModel.
Data files for this data release are numerous and cannot be easily displayed for browsing in the ScienceBase interface. Therefore, the data files are provided via a Globus Access Portal (linked under Related External Resources). Globus* is a fast, secure, and reliable way to move large data files and will automatically resume transfers when there are network disruptions. Learn more at https://www.globus.org/data-transfer.  

Publication Year 2024
Title Historical (2001-2013) and End-of-Century Future Climate Simulated Snowpack and Hydrometeorology for the Gallatin River, Montana and Wyoming
DOI 10.5066/P1GUHACU
Authors Theodore B Barnhart, William B Hamilton, Meryl B Storb
Product Type Data Release
Record Source USGS Digital Object Identifier Catalog
USGS Organization Wyoming-Montana Water Science Center - Helena Office