Dr. Jan Magnusson

I am a research scientist in the Snow Hydrology group at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Davos. My primary research focus is on operational snow hydrological topics, and I am particularly interested in using data assimilation techniques to improve large-scale snow forecasts. As a member of SLF’s operational snow hydrological service, we provide snow-related information to a range of organizations, including the flood forecasting team at the Federal Office for the Environment in Bern and the WhiteRisk avalanche platform.

With a background in applied research across various hydrological disciplines, I have worked in academia, government, and industry. At the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate in Oslo, I developed flood forecasting models and contributed to water balance mapping for hydropower potential assessments. At Statkraft AS, Europe's largest renewable energy company, I worked with snow monitoring and developed methods to improve inflow forecasts by assimilating snow observations.

In my doctoral thesis, I studied the impact of climate change on the snow cover in the Damma glacier catchment in the central Swiss Alps, as well as groundwater and proglacial stream dynamics on the glacier forefield. During my studies in environmental engineering at Uppsala University in Sweden, I measured snow interception with radar for my master thesis.

Research interest

• Operational snow hydrological forecasting
• Applied data assimilation within hydrology
• Snow research for the hydropower sector
• Monitoring of snow water resources
• Climate change impact on snow resources in mountainous regions

Publications

See my Google Scholar page for a complete list of publications.