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Abstract
The flow of water in the vicinity of ice layers within an isothermal snowpack is examined using Darcian laws. Treated as semipermeable boundaries, ice layers may reduce the residence time of water within the pack by delivering saturated flow to the downslope ice-layer edges, whence flow is transmitted downward faster than the speed of an unsaturated wave of meltwater that would exist in the absence of ice layers. This could produce a more rapid runoff than might be expected from a homogeneous snowpack. The effectiveness of this flow-timing mechanism depends on changing rates of meltwater influx. If a stratified snowpack is treated as an anisotropic medium, the anisotropy must be modeled as time-dependent over individual diurnal cycles.