Orographic forcing is a unique and dominant mechanism for transforming water vapor into consumable fresh water in the form of precipitation, snowpack, runoff, and groundwater. In the western US, where the complex terrain varies on a wide range of spatial scales, modeling orographic effects on precipitation and land surface hydrology is a significant challenge. In this presentation, we will compare two approaches for simulating orographic effects based on a subgrid parameterization of orographic precipitation and explicit simulation of orographic effects using high resolution modeling. We will investigate orographic effects on both warm and cold season processes, with the goal of identifying methods to improve the simulation of mountain snowpack and precipitation and their interannual variations.