Simulated Snowpack and Meteorological Variables for the Upper Colorado River Basin and Vicinity Using CONUS404 Historical and Future Mid-Century Meteorology

This data release contains historical and future climate SnowModel (Liston and Elder, 2006; Liston and others, 2020; Liston, 2020) simulation outputs on a 100-meter (m) geospatial grid for a 392-kilometer (km) x 469-km model domain in the Upper Colorado River Basin. The historical simulation (control, CTL) was run from 1979-09-01 to 2022-08-31 using the CONUS404 meteorology dataset (Rasmussen and others, 2023) and the future climate simulation was run from 1979-09-01 to 2021-08-31 using the CONUS404 pseudo global warming meteorology dataset (PGW, Xue and others, 2024). CONUS404 PGW was produced from CONUS404 using monthly perturbations in air temperature and precipitation to represent mid-century future conditions (Xue and other, 2024). The simulation encompasses key watersheds within the region and uses SnowModel to estimate the snow water resources and meteorology across the simulation domain. Simulated outputs provided in this data release include (1) air temperature (tair), (2) precipitation (prec), (3) solid precipitation (spre), (4) snow water equivalent (swed), (5) melted snow either held in the snowpack or drained (smlt), (6) liquid water supplied to the soil-snow or soil-air interface either from snowmelt or rainfall (roff), (7) precipitation amount falling as rain (rpre), (8) snow depth (snod), and (9) surface snow sublimation (ssub). 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 (Canada Centre for Remote Sensing and others, 2020) and elevation information (file topo.asc) was provided by the U.S. Geological Survey 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) (U.S. Geological Survey, 2025).

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