High Resolution Current and Future Climate SnowModel Simulations in the Upper Colorado River Basin

This data release contains SnowModel snow evolution simulation output on a 100-meter (m) geospatial grid for a 311 kilometer (km) × 300 km model domain in Colorado, United States, encompassing the Colorado and Gunnison River Basin headwaters in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model convection-permitting and orography-resolving (4-km grid spacing) regional climate simulations provided the atmospheric forcing conditions to drive SnowModel in both a current and future climate scenario. A pair of continuous 13-water-year (2001-13) WRF model simulations was utilized: (1) a current climate control (CTL) simulation forced using ERA-Interim reanalysis, and (2) a future climate simulation using the pseudo-global-warming (PGW) method that uses the ERA-Interim reanalysis for the same period as (1) and adds an ensemble mean climate delta from 100 years in the future for the most extreme Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario. The six SnowModel simulated outputs provided separately as child items in this data release include (1) air temperature (tair), (2) precipitation (prec), (3) precipitation amount falling as snow (spre), (4) snow water equivalent (swed), (5) liquid water supplied to the soil-snow interface from snowmelt (smlt), and (6) liquid water supplied to the soil-snow or soil-air interface either from snowmelt or rainfall (roff). The simulations used to produce these outputs were conducted on a 100-m geospatial grid. Land cover information (file vege.asc) for the simulation was provided by the 2010 North American Land Change Monitoring System and elevation information (file topo.asc) was provided by the U.S. Geological Survey National Elevation Dataset.