Southern Alberta has experienced significant water shortages and prolonged drought during the past few years. A lack of snowfall during winter or early melting of snowpack due to warmer winter temperatures and earlier spring periods can cause snow drought. Cool and dry Chinook winds blown from western Canada increase the snow melt in southern Alberta. This research focuses on an automated classification scheme for the types of snow droughts that can occur in southern Alberta during 1980-2023. The standardized SWE index (SWEI) is applied over 6 months from October to May to identify snow drought years. Snow drought years are then classified into three categories namely, warm, warm and dry, and dry. The ratio between mean Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) and cumulative precipitation (P) is used where P is utilized as a proxy to represent the effect of temperature in snow melt. K – means clustering method is used for the classification. Further, the effect of elevation on snow drought is investigated as topography changes substantially from the high-elevation Rocky Mountains to the southern Alberta plains in the east. Snow Time-series: Building Yearly Targeted Ensembles (FROSTBYTE) workflow will be used to gap-fill the Canadian historical SWE dataset (CANSWE). The frequency and intensity of snow drought are greater in the plains than in mountainous areas. The snow drought classification workflows and standard SWEI calculation are developed and available in the UC-HAL GitHub repository.
