57 years (1960–2017) of snow and meteorological observations from a mid-altitude mountain site (Col de Porte, France, 1325 m of altitude)

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce and provide access to daily (1960–2017) and hourly (1993–2017) datasets of snow and meteorological data measured at the Col de Porte site, 1325 m a.s.l., Chartreuse, France. Site metadata and ancillary measurements such as soil properties and masks of the incident solar radiation are also provided. Weekly snow profiles are made available from September 1993 to March 2018. A detailed study of the uncertainties originating from both measurement errors and spatial variability within the measurement site is provided for several variables. We show that the estimates of the ratio of diffuse-to-total shortwave broadband irradiance is affected by an uncertainty of ±0.21 (no unit). The estimated root mean square deviation, which mainly represents spatial variability, is ±10 cm for snow depth, ±25 kg m−2 for the water equivalent of snow cover (SWE), and ±1 K for soil temperature (±0.4 K during the snow season). The daily dataset can be used to quantify the effect of climate change at this site, with a decrease of the mean snow depth (1 December to 30 April) of 39 cm from the 1960–1990 period to the 1990–2017 period (40 % of the mean snow depth for 1960–1990) and an increase in temperature of +0.90 K for the same periods. Finally, we show that the daily and hourly datasets are useful and appropriate for driving and evaluating a snowpack model over such a long period. The data are placed on the repository of the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble (OSUG) data centre: https://doi.org/10.17178/CRYOBSCLIM.CDP.2018.