Streamflow and snowpack in the Tuolumne River Basin of California

Understanding the volume of water within the winter snowpack and its subsequent role on yielding streamflow is crucial to water management over many parts of the globe, including the western United States. Station measurements, like data collected from the Snow Telemetry (SNOTEL) network, play important roles in providing water allocation information for water managers to users throughout the growing season, but such data represent a point in space. Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) data collected from the Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) are at a fine spatial resolution (50 m) that captures the true volume of water stored in the snowpack. These data were combined with streamflow data to investigate the snowpack and streamflow relations during snowmelt in the spring and early summer for the Tuolumne River Basin in California. We calculated the rate at which SWE decreased during melt from the ASO data, and the volume of water that contributed to streamflow during snowmelt for each of the days that ASO data were available. This correlation will provide more temporal information about the progression of snowmelt and its contribution to streamflow, which will be useful for water allocation.