Trends in Snow-Line Elevation Along the Wasatch Front, Utah from MODIS Fractional Snow-Covered Area

The main source of water for the over 2 million people that reside along the Wasatch Front is annual melt of
the mountain snowpack. There has been vast infrastructure developed to capture and transport melt water as it flows
out of the mountains in the spring and summer. This natural reservoir is at risk, as population continues to increase
and the climate warms and becomes more variable, this water source will become less reliable, straining the current
water delivery system. Therefore, it is important to quantitatively understand how the snowpack has been changing
over time, in order to predict and forecast how it will change, spatially and temporally, in the future. This project
assesses changes in the Wasatch Front’s snowline elevation and snow-covered area, on April 1st, over the last 18 years
from the MODIS Snow-covered Area and Grain Size (MODSCAG) fractional snow-covered area product (fSCA).
Although the data set does not span a multi-decade time series, which is typically preferred for climate analysis, the
analysis shows a positive trend in snow-line elevation (toward high elevations) and negative trend in snow-covered
area (declining snow-covered area).