Climatic Induced Snowpack Surfaces on Lebanon’s Mountains

ABSTRACT

There are tremendous aspects of water resources in Lebanon where the surface water sources are the most exploited. However, snow is still the major water aspect that plays a role in feeding groundwater, springs and rivers. This water resource has been ignored since long-time and it was considered only for tourism. Nevertheless, the recently existed challenges on water supply in the region, notably the challenging climatic variability, makes it necessary to monitor the behavior and dynamics of snowpack on the mountainous regions of Lebanon. Therefore, several studies have been carried out in this respect, focusing on the use of space observations along several time series. While, few concerns were given to the physical characteristic and behavior of snow melt that resulting water flow regime. This study includes two major components of investigation. These are: the analysis of remotely sensed data to monitor snow cover area and the direct investigation of snow samples in the field to measure the melting rate and patterns. Therefore, daily MODIS satellite images, with moderate spatial resolution, were analyzed to detect any changing in the snow cover area, as well as to deduce the accumulation and melting regime. Whereas, field investigations were applied to 275 sites with different altitudes, dates and terrain aspects. The measures were analyzed to identify the relationship between snow cover dynamic, snow materials characteristics and the physical setting. Thiswill be a helpful tool to identify the climate control on the snowpack; in addition, it contributes for new inputs on water resource management approaches, notably in the view of changing climatic regime.

Keywords: