Abstract. We strategically placed spatially distributed sensors to provide
representative measures of changes in snowpack and subsurface water storage,
plus the fluxes affecting these stores, in a set of nested headwater
catchments. The high temporal frequency and distributed coverage make the
resulting data appropriate for process studies of snow accumulation and melt,
infiltration, evapotranspiration, catchment water balance, (bio)geochemistry,
and other critical-zone processes. We present 8 years of hourly
snow-depth, soil-moisture, and soil-temperature data, as well as 14 years of
quarter-hourly streamflow and meteorological data that detail water-balance
processes at Providence Creek, the upper part of which is at the current
50 % rain versus snow transition of the southern Sierra Nevada,
California. Providence Creek is the long-term study cooperatively run by the
Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (SSCZO) and the USDA Forest Service
Pacific Southwest Research Station's Kings River Experimental Watersheds (KREW). The
4.6 km2 montane Providence Creek catchment spans the current lower
rain–snow transition elevation of 1500–2100 m. Two meteorological stations
bracket the high and low elevations of the catchment, measuring air
temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, precipitation, wind speed
and direction, and snow depth, and at the higher station, snow water
equivalent. Paired flumes at three subcatchments and a V-notch weir at the
integrating catchment measure quarter-hourly streamflow. Measurements of
meteorological and streamflow data began in 2002. Between 2008 and 2010, 50
sensor nodes were added to measure distributed snow depth, air temperature,
soil temperature, and soil moisture within the top 1 m below the surface.
These sensor nodes were installed to capture the lateral differences of
aspect and canopy coverage. Data are available at hourly and daily intervals
by water year (1 October–30 September) in nonproprietary formats from
online data repositories. Data for the Southern Sierra Critical Zone
Observatory distributed snow and soil datasets are at
https://doi.org/10.6071/Z7WC73. Kings River Experimental Watersheds
meteorological data are available from
https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2018-0028 and stream-discharge data are
available from https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2017-0037.
Spatially distributed water-balance and meteorological data from the rain–snow transition, southern Sierra Nevada, California
