The WMO-SPICE Snow-on-Ground Intercomparison: Overview and Preliminary Results

As part of the WMO Solid Precipitation Intercomparison Experiment (SPICE), instrument manufacturers and intercomparison site hosts have provided various snow depth and snow water equivalent (SWE) measurement instrumentation for evaluation and intercomparison. Host sites include Sodankyla (Finland), Caribou Creek and the Centre for Atmospheric Research Experiments (Canada), and Col de Porte (France). Instruments include sonic and optical snow depth instrumentation and passive gamma radiation and weighing SWE instrumentation. Many of the sites carry out manual snow depth and SWE observations and several have high frequency camera observations of snow depth rulers. These observations serve as the reference measurements for the evaluation of the automated instruments at various time scales. The objectives of the SPICE Snow-on-Ground (SoG) intercomparison are to assess instrument performance, examine measurement thresholds, link SoG measurements to gauge measurements of liquid water equivalent, and assess spatial representation of the automated point measurements. An overview of the SoG component of SPICE and some preliminary results will be presented.