Impacts of Snowmelt on Peak Flows in a Forest Watershed

Using data of long-term observations at three gauging stations and one climatic station in a forest region in southeast Germany, the impacts of snowmelt on peak flow have been investigated in this paper. Results show that the major climatic feature was found to be a precipitation maximum during the hydrological summer, and the major hydrological feature was a discharge maximum during the hydrological winter. Empirical equations describing snow depth and snow water equivalent for the studied climatic station have been developed for both snow accumulation period and ablation period. Through introducing snowmelt-rainfall depth as a new variable, the present work investigates the simultaneous occurrence of snowmelt and rainfall on snow cover, assesses the characteristics of runoff including peak flows, calculates the runoff from the snowmelt and rainfall. A hydrological model has been applied to generate hydrographs resulted from snowmelt and rainfall-on-snow. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007