Snowmelt parameters for Alberta and Saskatchewan |
I would greatly appreciate it, if you could provide some guidance about finding snowmelt parameters for the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada.
Min. Melt Coefficient (mm/hr/deg C) Max. Melt Coefficient (mm/hr/deg C) Initial Snow Depth (mm) Initial Free water (mm)
Octaviano - the melt coefficients are not necessarily sensitive to location, and the initial conditions parameters are of little consequence if you do continuous simulation. I suggest you calibrate a one-catchment model to observed snow depth and daily temperatures. This data is available long-term at many airports, e.g. 50+ years for Calgary at:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/all/CA003031093.dly
If you can't obtain hourly precipitation for the locale, you could probably use daily for the purposes of calibrating the snow parameters, or you could synthetically disaggregate it. Keep in mind that SWMM models water-equivalent, and the reported data is actual snow pack. There's a great ;) paper on the topic at http://cedb.asce.org/cgi/WWWdisplay.cgi?264707 and previous discussions in the SWMM-USERS archives, e.g.
https://www.openswmm.org/topic/3666/snowmelt-modelling-rainfall-induced-melting
and
https://www.openswmm.org/topic/2217/snowmelt
NetSTORM (http://www.dynsystem.com/netstorm) can read the relevant parameters from the GHCN file and disaggregate the daily precipitation.