Trail Valley Creek Snow Community Land Model 5.0 (TVCSnowCLM)

This record is for the dataset "V-Dutch/TVCSnowCLM: Paper Accepted! (Version v1)” at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7137729 Snowpack microstructure controls the transfer of heat to, and the temperature of, the underlying soils. In situ measurements of snow and soil properties from four field campaigns during two different winters (March and November 2018, January and March 2019) were compared to an ensemble of CLM5.0 (Community Land Model) simulations, at Trail Valley Creek, Northwest Territories, Canada.

Snow Micro Penetrometer profiles allowed snowpack density and thermal conductivity to be derived at higher vertical resolution (1.25 mm) and a larger sample size (n = 1050) compared to traditional snowpit observations (3 cm vertical resolution; n = 115). Comparing measurements with simulations shows CLM overestimated snow thermal conductivity by a factor of 3, leading to a cold bias in wintertime soil temperatures (RMSE = 5.8 ℃).