An identical twin experiment starting from poor initial condition on 1/1/87, shows that the assimilation scheme is able to recover the “true” SWE effectively. This is to be expected because the observation used is the total snow water equivalent.  Snow depth is overestimated initially due to a poor estimate of the snow density by the model. It steadily converges towards the truth by the end of February 1987 (Fig. 7).  Snow temperature is well estimated in both the assimilation and forecast simulations .