A STATISTICAL STRUCTURE OF LARGE-SCALE SNOW COVER FIELD

A. V. Kislov, L. M. Kitaev, and I. S. Konstantinov

Statistical space-time characteristics of snow cover over the former USSR are studied on the basis of the snow cover data archive developed at the Institute of Geography under the Russian Academy of Sciences. The results can be used to estimate the errors of spatially averaged values. It is shown that for the 3×5° grid cells located on the East European Plain, a relative error of calculation of spatially averaged values amounts to 3-5% in the central part and almost doubles northward and southward. In the first case it is caused by a sparse observation network, and in the second case, by the increased year-to-year variability of snow cover.

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