The aim of the proposed research is to exploit this potential and significantly improve the treatment of snow cover dynamics in glacier mass balance research. We propose to combine high-resolution measurements and modeling of surface height change, precipitation, wind fields and transport mechanisms as well as snow density and albedo changes, and surface energy balance in order to develop new model tools for overcoming a series of present-day shortcomings. A resulting model chain will explicitly consider the involved scales, and describe the processes from the generation of snow fall in the atmosphere to the glacier-wide mass balance. In the end, we will perform quality and sensitivity analyses to assess the impacts of the snow cover dynamics on the mass balance of a glacier.