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Abstract

Wind-blowing snow reshapes the snow patterns in high mountain areas and results in a significant impact on local energy balance and hydrological processes. High Mountain Asia, with the most abundant snow budget outside of polar regions, contributes a huge uncertainty to the estimation of terrestrial snow mass balance due to the interactions of blowing snow processes and complex terrain. In this work, we present a framework combining field observations, remote sensing, and high-resolution modeling to predict the snow cover evolution in the typical basins of High Mountain Asia. A mobile 3-D comprehensive observation system including radar systems, automatic weather station, and snow particle counters, was built to characterize the characteristics of wind – temperature – humidity – blowing snow flux profiles, as well as the resulting snow distribution patterns. Snow redistribution, blowing snow sublimation, snow cornice formation, and snow avalanche are processes considered in the framework. The field observations were compared to both remote sensing data and high-resolution modeling with CRYOWRF, a new modeling framework for atmospheric flow simulations for Cryospheric-regions, which couples the state-of-the-art and widely used atmospheric model WRF with the detailed snow cover model SNOWPACK. Our work has the potential to contribute to precise estimates of snow distribution in mountains.