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Wednesday, December 20, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Citizen scientists needed
to measure snowpack
By Steve Lundeberg
AP Writer
C O RVA L L I S – T h e
National Aeronautics and
Space Administration is look-
ing for snowshoers, back-
country skiers and snow-
machine users in the Pacific
Northwest to gather data to
use in computer modeling
for snow-water equivalent, or
SWE.
SWE refers to how much
water a particular amount of
snow contains, information
that’s important to scien-
tists, engineers, and land and
watershed managers.
NASA is funding a four-
year project that involves an
Oregon State University civil
engineering professor, David
Hill, and Ph.D. student, Ryan
Crumley, as well as research-
ers at the University of
Washington and the Alaska
Division of Geological &
Geophysical Surveys.
The project is called
Community
Snow
Observations and is part of
NASA’s Citizen Science for
Earth Systems program.
“Our initial model runs
show that the citizen science
measurements are doing an
amazing job of improving
our simulations,” said David
Hill of the OSU College of
Engineering. “NASA has an
unbelievable number of satel-
lite assets in the sky produc-
ing incredible information
about what’s going on in the
earth’s systems, and they’re
leveraging information and
expertise from the public
to make their product even
better.”
Getting
involved
in Community Snow
Observations is easy. A smart-
phone, the free Mountain
Hub application, and an ava-
lanche probe with graduated
markings in centimeters are
the only tools a recreationist
needs.
As citizen scientists make
their way through the moun-
tains, they use their ava-
lanche probes to take snow
depth readings that they then
upload into Mountain Hub, a
fully featured app for outdoor
users.
That’s all there is to it.
“Traditionally, the types of
models we run have relied on
‘point’ measurements, such as
snow telemetry stations,” Hill
said. “Citizen scientists who
are traveling in backcountry
snow environments can pro-
vide us with much more data
than those stations provide.”
Community
Snow
Observations kicked off
in February 2017. Led
by Hill, Gabe Wolken of
the University of Alaska
Fairbanks and Anthony
Arendt of the University
of Washington, the project
has so far focused primar-
ily on Alaskan snowpacks.
Researchers are now looking
to recruit citizen scientists in
the Pacific Northwest as well,
and if possible in the Rocky
Mountain region also.
Alaska Fairbanks has
spearheaded the public
involvement aspect of the
project, while the UW’s chief
role is managing the data. Hill
and Crumley are responsible
for the modeling.
Which particular geo-
graphic areas get modeled “is
kind of up to the public,” Hill
said, adding that the more the
data are spread out over time
and space, the better.
“The models take into
account the temporal densi-
fication of the snowpack and
the spatial variability in snow-
water equivalent and how
snow properties are always
changing, even in a given
location,” he said. “If we get
a whole bunch of measure-
ments on one day in one spot,
that has value, but the more
we can get things stretched
out, the more coverage we
get, the better modeling prod-
ucts we can produce.”
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