A Fundamental Study on the Snowmelt Effects for Long-Term Runoff Analysis

The objectives of this study are to adopt a snowmelt model for coupling a rainfall-runoff model and to study snowmelt effects for long-term runoff analysis on the northeast mountaneous area in Korea. The NWS temperature-index snowmelt model was selected and tested on the 1,059+,6 km Naerinchen basin. It can be observed that the time variations of the computed areal extents of snow cover from the model are well agreement with those of the observe station snowfall records on the Inje meteorological station. It is also evident that the computed soil water contents and river flows indicate quite different behaviors with or without snowmelt model. It is concluded that the snowmelt model works well and the snowmelt effects for multi-decadal river flow computations are important on the study area.