An Assessment of Snowmelt through a Snowmelt Prediction Model in the White Mountains of New Hampshire

Despite the numerous observational analyses of snowpack melt in western North America, comparatively few have been performed in eastern North America. Multiple analyses of snow melt have been completed as shown in the current literature, albeit only a few of these studies focus on the eastern North American snowpack. The eastern snowpack behaves quite differently compared to its western counterparts because it is typically denser due to the more humid environment and more rain-on-snow events. As such, this research aims to analyze snow melt for an eastern North American snowpack located on Mount Washington in the White Mountain National Forest of New Hampshire for the winter of 2019. Analysis of snow melt was completed using the temperature indexing melt prediction model used in the research completed by Walters et al. (2005). While not completely accurate, the indexing model performed reasonably when using a melt factor of 0.006 (units of meter per degree Celsius). However, the model was improved when optimizing the melt factor (on average found to be 0.002 for the study region) for best fit. In addition, some of the discrepancies can be qualitatively explained through the snow energy balance equation as presented in Dingman (2015), which will be explored in this presentation.