ARS Snowpack Reports

Agriculture in the west relies on the seasonal snowpack to provide a supply of water throughout the summer season. Proper water resource management is important not only for agriculture, but for ecosystem services, flood control, drought management, power generation, and domestic water supply. Northwest Watershed Research Center (NWRC) partnered with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) to aid in water supply and flood mitigation during the historic drought in California. The project combines ARS’s physically based snow model, iSnobal, with frequent airborne lidar surveys. Operationally running the model and plane in real time provides water managers spatial information never before available as to where the water stored as snow is located. Water manager’s take the information to aid their decisions for flood mitigation, reservoir outflows, and power generation.

Real time and historic water supply reports by ARS are shown below for all the watersheds with model results. To learn more about our software, visit the USDA-ARS-NWRC GitHub Page.

Disclaimer: The work is an ongoing research project and the data is provisional and subject to change at anytime.

Snowpack Report Data

Access the latest data from the snowpack summary reports. For each basin, csv files will contain a daily time series of model results for snow water equivalent (SWE) and snow water input (SWI).

 The data is available at our managed file services located here. 
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