New way to monitor snowpack could be critical in the arid West

At a time when monitoring mountain snowpack is crucial for communities throughout the American West, has the next generation of measuring snow depth arrived? Some top researchers seem to think so. “We really feel we have the next evolution for water management,” said Jeffery Deems, a research scientist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center. In the early 2010s, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory teamed with the California Department of Water Resources to create the Airborne Snow Observatory to develop a new way of tracking snowpack in the mountains, looking to Light Detection and Ranging (lidar), a 3D scanning system, as a possible answer. Lidar is not new technology. For years, it has been outfitted on planes to send beams down to earth to map elevations on the landscape, evaluate flood plains and even find the remnants of archaeological ruins underneath the ground. But researchers started wondering if it could be applied to measuring snowpack. The first flights were conducted in California in fall 2012 to create a baseline model of the mountains without snow, flying about 20,000 feet off the ground for five to six hours in a back-and-forth pattern. Then, after a few storms, planes took flight again, and researchers were able to subtract elevation amounts to determine precise snow depths through high-resolution maps. “We see it as moving from a sparse-point base network (with Snotel) to a system that can map the entire snowpack in a river basin,” Deems said. “It is really an enabling technology.”...MORE