Extrapolating Snow Measurements on the Marmot Creek Experimental Basin

From 1969 to 1980, each March, snow depth and water equivalent were sampled around 249 pins of a grid covering the forested portion of Marmot Creek basin. Continuous record from four snow pillows and monthly data from six snow courses were used to extrapolate the spatially intensive grid data to other winter months. Snow courses were better estimators of grid data than snow pillows. Readings from about 80 % of the pins were correlated to the data from one or the other snow pillows with r² above 0.70. The ability of a snow course to track the year-to-year variations in the March data of individual pins of the grid was not related to similarities in elevation or aspects between the course and the pins.