the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 20 Jan 2025
Northern Hemisphere in situ snow water equivalent dataset (NorSWE, 1979–2021)
Abstract. In situ observations of snow water equivalent (SWE) are critical for climate applications and resource management yet there is no global database of in situ SWE observations. We present a dataset the Northern Hemisphere in situ snow water equivalent dataset (NorSWE) consisting of over 11.5 million SWE observations from more than 10 thousand different locations across the Northern Hemisphere spanning the modern satellite era (1979–2021). NorSWE builds on an existing framework applied to Canadian data (CanSWE; Vionnet et al., 2021) and includes SWE observations from manual snow courses covering Canada, the United States, Finland and Russia. Snow pillows, automated passive gamma radiation sensors, and airborne passive gamma SWE estimates provide additional coverage over North America. In addition to SWE, snow depth (SD) and derived bulk snow density are included when available. A consistent quality control is applied to all records and the final dataset delivered as a single NetCDF file that is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14503592 (Mortimer and Vionnet, 2024).
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RC1: 'Comment on essd-2024-602', Adrià Fontrodona-Bach, 17 Feb 2025
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This paper presents a dataset of manual and automated in situ measurements of snow water equivalent (SWE) over the Northern Hemisphere, which is called NorSWE. To the best of my knowledge, there is no in situ global SWE dataset publicly available to date. Currently, researchers need to compile such a dataset from each individual source every time they require it for their applications, and apply their own filters and quality checks, which is time and labour intensive. The scientific community will therefore highly benefit from this dataset, and it fits very well within the scope of the journal. The dataset is excellent, offers a wide range of applications (as the authors very well describe and demonstrate in the paper) and is especially timely as many global products and applications rely on actual SWE measurements and are being increasingly used by the community. The authors did an impressive data compilation and data curation work. The paper is also well written and clear and I hope to see it published soon. However, I have a few minor comments/suggestions and technical corrections that should be addressed before the paper is published.
I only have one rather major suggestion, but I call it major just because it may require a bit more time than the rest of minor comments. It regards the spatial coverage of the dataset. The dataset covers a large part of the Northern Hemisphere, but there are some gaps, which the authors recognise in Section 8 (Lines 373-380). It is true that there is a lack of observations in certain areas (e.g. high mountain Asia), and that many other SWE data are just not publicly available. I also acknowledge that it is not possible to find and include every single available dataset and that a line must be drawn somewhere. However, there is some data available over Europe which the authors did not include and which I strongly encourage they do. These include the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, and a few other individual sites over the Alps. The sources are well listed in Table 1 in Fontrodona-Bach et al. (2023), and they are also used and listed by Seo et al. (2025) in Table 1 https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-349 (preprint). This would give some coverage (despite being still limited) to the European Alps and to Scandinavia outside of Finland, and I strongly encourage that these datasets are included. If the authors wish, they can get in touch with me and I will send them some notes on how I downloaded these data.
I do not know if the authors requested permission to each individual agency to include their data in NorSWE (if they did, maybe they should explain this in the paper). In any case, in my opinion it is necessary to include clear statements that when using NorSWE data, all the original data sources (so all source datasets) must be appropriately cited as well as the citation of this paper and the NorSWE dataset itself (which is on Zenodo). This provides clear and proper acknowledgement to previous data collections that form this compilations dataset.
I think this dataset will be very useful and I look forward to seeing this paper published and the dataset in use. The rest of comments are listed in the attached pdf.
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RC2: 'Comment on essd-2024-602', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 Feb 2025
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I appreciate the authors' effort in creating a centralized data repository for all snow data. I have a few suggestions to further enhance the paper:
1) Maybe not in this paper, I suggest that the authors consider including data from the California Department of Water Resources (CADWR) snow data and ASO Lidar SWE data when they update their data repository in the future.
2) Different data sources have distinct measurement protocols, which can make uniform quality control difficult. It may be helpful for the authors to discuss the limitations of different datasets, such as the temperature bias and the precipitation underestimation issue in SNOTEL, and reference other works that have attempted to address these challenges.
3) Other snow-related data sources, such as UA-SWE data for 4-km resolution over CONUS and satellite snow cover data, could also be discussed in the paper.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-602-RC2
Data sets
Northern Hemisphere historical in-situ Snow Water Equivalent dataset (NorSWE, 1979-2021) Colleen Mortimer and Vincent Vionnet https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14503592
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