Understanding snow conditions is key to developing a better understanding of hydrologic, biological, and ecosystem processes at work in northern Alaska. The required snow datasets currently do not exist at spatial or temporal scales needed by end users such as scientists, land managers, and policy makers. There are a wide variety of snow datasets that may be generated by this project. The list of desired datasets will be refined based on input from potential end users. However, outputs could include daily spatial distributions spanning the spatial and temporal domains of interest of the following variables: air temperature, wind speed and direction, relative humidity, surface (skin) temperature, incoming solar radiation, albedo, incoming and outgoing longwave radiation, latent and sensible heat fluxes, liquid and solid (snowfall) precipitation, snowmelt, blowing-snow and static-surface sublimation, blowing and drifting snow flux, snowmelt runoff, snow depth, snow density, snow water equivalent, snow hardness, rain-on-snow events, changes in snow and growing season lengths, hydrologic budgets, winter soil microbial activity, and snow thermal characteristics.
