Our skill in modeling mountain rain and snow is bypassing the skill of our observational networks

This conclusion is primarily based on comparisons with streamflow and snow in basins across the western United States and in Iceland, Europe, and Asia.

Even though they outperform gridded datasets based on gauge networks, atmospheric models still disagree with each other on annual average precipitation and often disagree more on their representation of individual storms. Research to address these difficulties must make use of a wide range of observations (snow, streamflow, ecology, radar, satellite) and bring together scientists from different disciplines and a wide range of communities.