Spatially distributed water-balance and meteorological data from the rain-snow transition, southern Sierra Nevada, California

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. We present eight years of hourly snow-depth, soil-moisture and soil-temperature data, and 14 years of quarter-hourly streamflow and meteorological data that detail water-balance processes at the rain-snow transition at Providence Creek in the southern Sierra Nevada, California. Providence Creek is the co-operated long-term study run by the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory and the U.S.D.A. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station's Kings River Experimental Watersheds. The 4-km2 montane Providence Creek catchment spans the current 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 down to a depth of 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 (October 1–September 30) in non-proprietary formats from online data repositories (https://doi.org/10.6071/Z7WC73 and https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2017-0037).