Identifying Changes in Snowpack Surface Roughness Characteristics

The flow of air over a surface is influenced by its roughness. The surface of a snowpack is smooth relative to the underlying ground surface. The relative roughness of the snowpack surface changes directionally, spatially, and temporally, due to deposition, erosion, and melt. To examine these changes in snowpack surface roughness at the microtopographic scale for a Northern Colorado site, the surface was photographed using a darker-coloured roughness board that was inserted into the snowpack so that a black (board) versus white (snow) contrast existed along the entire length of the board. The board was 1-m long and was inserted 11 times at 10-cm intervals to create a 1-m by 1-m mesh. The orientation of the boards was rotated 90 degrees to provide finer resolution data in perpendicular directions. For the 1-m boards, the pixel resolution was approximately 0.4 mm. To measure the snow grain scale, a crystal card was photographed and yielded a pixel resolution of approximately 0.1 mm. Incorporating image processing issues such as image contrast and brightness, the digital images were translated into individual lines. These lines were used to compute semi- variograms in log-log space, from which the magnitude of semi-variance, the fractal dimensions, and the scale break were computed. The semi-variogram characteristics were used to illustrate directional, spatial, and temporal changes in snowpack surface roughness.