Abstract Forest clearings are common features of evergreen forests and produce snowpack accumulation and melt differing from that in adjacent forests and open terrain. This study has investigated the challenges in specifying the turbulent fluxes of sensible and latent heat to snowpacks in forest clearings. The snowpack in two forest clearings in the Canadian Rockies was simulated using a one-dimensional (1D) snowpack model. A trade-off was found between optimizing against measured snow surface temperature or snowmelt when choosing how to specify the turbulent fluxes. Schemes using the Monin–Obukhov similarity theory tended to produce negatively biased surface temperature, while schemes that enhanced turbulent fluxes, to reduce the surface temperature bias, resulted in too much melt. Uncertainty estimates from Monte Carlo experiments showed that no realistic parameter set could successfully remove biases in both surface temperature and melt. A simple scheme that excludes atmospheric stability correction was required to successfully simulate surface temperature under low wind speed conditions. Nonturbulent advective fluxes and/or nonlocal sources of turbulence are thought to account for the maintenance of heat exchange in low-wind conditions. The simulation of snowmelt was improved by allowing enhanced latent heat fluxes during low-wind conditions. Caution is warranted when snowpack models are optimized on surface temperature, as model tuning may compensate for deficiencies in conceptual and numerical models of radiative, conductive, and turbulent heat exchange at the snow surface and within the snowpack. Such model tuning could have large impacts on the melt rate and timing of the snow-free transition in simulations of forest clearings within hydrological and meteorological models.

Abstract A distributed snow model is applied to simulate the spatiotemporal evolution of the Austrian snow cover at 1 km × 1 km spatial and daily temporal resolution for the period 1948–2009. After a comprehensive model validation, changes in snow cover conditions are analyzed for all of Austria as well as for different Austrian subregions and elevation belts focusing on the change in snow cover days (SCDs). The comparison of SCDs for the period 1950–79 to those achieved for 1980–2009 for all of Austria shows a decrease in SCDs with a maximum of >35 SCDs near Villach (Carinthia). The analysis of SCD changes in different subregions of Austria reveals mean changes between −11 and −15 days with highest absolute change in SCDs for southern Austria. Two decrease maxima could be identified in elevations of 500–2000 m MSL (between −13 and −18 SCDs depending on the subregion considered) and above 2500 m MSL (over −20 SCDs in the case of central Austria). The temporal distribution of SCD change in the Austrian subregions is characterized by a reduction of SCDs in midwinter and at the end of winter rather than by fewer SCDs in early winter. With respect to the temporal distribution of SCD change in different elevation belts, changes in elevations below 1000 m MSL are characterized by a distinct reduction of SCDs in January. With increasing elevation the maximum change in SCDs shifts toward the summer season, reaching a maximum decrease in the months of June–August above 2500 m MSL.