Graphical Abstract

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Ito, R., T. Aoyagi, N. Hori, M. Oh’izumi, H. Kawase, K. Dairaku, N. Seino, and H. Sasaki, 2018: Improvement of snow depth reproduction in Japanese urban areas by the inclusion of a snowpack scheme in the SPUC model. J. Meteor. Soc. Japan, 96, 511-534.
https://doi.org/10.2151/jmsj.2018-053   Graphical Abstract with highlights

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Highlights:

• To represent seasonal variations in urban snow cover, we enhanced a square prism urban canopy (SPUC) model by introducing two new snowpack schemes: one based on a diagnostic approach (sSPUCdgn) and the other on a prognostic approach (sSPUCprg).
• Our offline experiments indicated that both schemes are useful for the reproduction of a seasonal variation in snow depth and its peak on the ground around a building and on the building roof (Fig. 1), but sSPUCprg is needed when we wish to consider the processes in the snow layer.
• Compared with iSiB, the new scheme enabled SPUC to reduce the error of seasonal variations in snow depth significantly at urban sites with a cold bias above 1°C in iSiB (Fig. 2), by a different calculation method for the snow surface temperature from the method in iSiB and the inclusion of building walls without snow.