"Snow cover and its importance to agriculture in Austria and the Czech Republic"

Snow cover influences most of the agricultural lands in the Central Europe and success of some cropping schemes (e.g. production of winter cereals) depends on its character and depth. The snow cover not only affects evapotranspiration, energy budgets, soil moisture for agricultural crops but in the same time it regulates soil freezing and influences soil hydraulic properties and the over-winter survival of crops (as well as other species). Most of the snow cover studies has been motivated by water supply and safety concerns and focused on deep snowpacks of mountains or forested regions whilst most of the agricultural environments are characterized by relatively thin snowpack and also issues of practical importance are significantly different from those surrounding deeper snow. As only limited effort has been made to close this gap the goal of this project is to develop reliable snow cover model (SCM) for such agricultural regions that could become part of the key agrometeorological models. This model will be then verified at 20 Austrian and Czech sites with prime weather and snow cover data and also using satellite pictures of the snow cover. In the next step the SCM will be coupled with models used for calculations of the evapotranspiration, global solar radiation, crop yields and pest/disease infestation pressure. Performance of the original and SCM-coupled versions of these models will be evaluated. Due to lack of snow cover representation in these models we expect their significantly better performance after incorporation of the SCM. In addition a standalone version of the SCM will be coupled with the GIS and with climatological database in order to derive maps of the snow cover probability in the agriculturally used areas under present as well as under expected climate conditions. The project is aimed at tackling an issue that causes persistent problems in several research projects of both institutions. As the necessary data, software and equipment are available at one or the other institutions, the support of this project will be instrumental in enabling to joint existing databases, increase work efficiency thanks to sharing of the research load and complementary fields of expertise.