A Physically Driven Long Short Term Memory Model for Estimating Snow Water Equivalent over the Continental United States

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Saranathan, Arun M., Saeedimoghaddam, Mahmoud, Smith, Brandon, Raghunandan, Deepthi, Nearing, Grey, Pelissier, Craig
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Saranathan, Arun M.
Saeedimoghaddam, Mahmoud
Smith, Brandon
Raghunandan, Deepthi
Nearing, Grey
Pelissier, Craig
author_facet Saranathan, Arun M.
Saeedimoghaddam, Mahmoud
Smith, Brandon
Raghunandan, Deepthi
Nearing, Grey
Pelissier, Craig
contents Snow is an essential input for various land surface models. Seasonal snow estimates are available as snow water equivalent (SWE) from process-based reanalysis products or locally from in situ measurements. While the reanalysis products are computationally expensive and available at only fixed spatial and temporal resolutions, the in situ measurements are highly localized and sparse. To address these issues and enable the analysis of the effect of a large suite of physical, morphological, and geological conditions on the presence and amount of snow, we build a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, which is able to estimate the SWE based on time series input of the various physical/meteorological factors as well static spatial/morphological factors. Specifically, this model breaks down the SWE estimation into two separate tasks: (i) a classification task that indicates the presence/absence of snow on a specific day and (ii) a regression task that indicates the height of the SWE on a specific day in the case of snow presence. The model is trained using physical/in situ SWE measurements from the SNOw TELemetry (SNOTEL) snow pillows in the western United States. We will show that trained LSTM models have a classification accuracy of $\geq 93\%$ for the presence of snow and a coefficient of correlation of $\sim 0.9$ concerning their SWE estimates. We will also demonstrate that the models can generalize both spatially and temporally to previously unseen data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_20129
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Physically Driven Long Short Term Memory Model for Estimating Snow Water Equivalent over the Continental United States
Saranathan, Arun M.
Saeedimoghaddam, Mahmoud
Smith, Brandon
Raghunandan, Deepthi
Nearing, Grey
Pelissier, Craig
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Machine Learning
Snow is an essential input for various land surface models. Seasonal snow estimates are available as snow water equivalent (SWE) from process-based reanalysis products or locally from in situ measurements. While the reanalysis products are computationally expensive and available at only fixed spatial and temporal resolutions, the in situ measurements are highly localized and sparse. To address these issues and enable the analysis of the effect of a large suite of physical, morphological, and geological conditions on the presence and amount of snow, we build a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, which is able to estimate the SWE based on time series input of the various physical/meteorological factors as well static spatial/morphological factors. Specifically, this model breaks down the SWE estimation into two separate tasks: (i) a classification task that indicates the presence/absence of snow on a specific day and (ii) a regression task that indicates the height of the SWE on a specific day in the case of snow presence. The model is trained using physical/in situ SWE measurements from the SNOw TELemetry (SNOTEL) snow pillows in the western United States. We will show that trained LSTM models have a classification accuracy of $\geq 93\%$ for the presence of snow and a coefficient of correlation of $\sim 0.9$ concerning their SWE estimates. We will also demonstrate that the models can generalize both spatially and temporally to previously unseen data.
title A Physically Driven Long Short Term Memory Model for Estimating Snow Water Equivalent over the Continental United States
topic Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20129