Modelling Snow Distribution and Implications for Human Activities

The annual accumulation and ablation of snow across the landscape is key to understanding the range of processes, from glaciation and hydrology through to agriculture, hunting and the impacts of domesticated livestock grazing. Snow hazard landscapes are often remote, inaccessible and lack observation data. Therefore models are valuable tools for understanding the effects of climate and vegetation change on snow/landscape interaction. A new, physically based snow distribution and melt model is tested and applied across Arctic landscapes at sufficiently high resolutions to be relevant to relatively small scale human processes, such as settlement. Model scenarios simulate the impact of the past and possible future climate change on snow cover over landscapes with a range of different vegetation covers. The output gives insight into the impact of changing snow cover on settlements, and the possibility of using vegetation change as a mitigation strategy against the effects of potential future climate change on snow cover.