I didn't think I was tired but I think it just hit.
Yeah, frozen granola bars.
I'm Carrie Vuyovich.
I am a research scientist at NASA Goddard and a project
scientist for NASA SnowEx 2023. We're here in Alaska in
Fairbanks measuring snow in the boreal forest.
Hold on your breakfast
We're in Creamer's field Farmer's Loop research site
right now, we have three sites here in Fairbanks. And then we
have two sites on the north slope in the tundra. The goal
for SnowEx is to improve our remote sensing capabilities of
snow, different properties of snow, in different environments,
and at different times of the season. Water is so important to
the western US and they've had some snow droughts over the past
decade. And so understanding how much water is stored in the snow
is is super important. Right now, that means either airborne
measurements or sending people out to make manual measurements,
which doesn't cover the entire Western US. So what we're hoping
is that our measurements will help us understand what
technology could be used on satellite mission, that could
then collect measurements over that entire area. So kind of
core measurements take place at these pit locations, we take
very detailed profile measurements of the snow in
those pits, including temperature and density, liquid
water content. And then around those plots, we're taking very
detailed depth profiles. And then further out from there,
we're taking just a lot more depth measurements. All of that
is within the flight lines of the radar and the LIDAR
observations so that we can connect what those observations
see with what we measure on the ground.
We're headed to Bonanza Creek experimental forest. And we're
gonna do a bunch of pit measurements out there and depth
measurements where we characterize snowpack in
different locations. And that will be used for ground truth
for the air— airborne flights and instruments that we have
flying over the same area. It's about minus 20 Fahrenheit here
right now. And I'm continuing to put on clothes because I just
got out of the truck. And that was pretty warm and I am
changing body temperature very quickly.
I'm with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service,
we actually are tasked with making water supply forecasts
for the entire western United States, we have about 600
different watersheds that we model and deliver seasonal
runoff forecasts for. The reason why
we look at snow density is so that if you have a given
snowpack of five feet tall. The amount of water when you melt it
all down could be close to one glass full of water or it could
be more like three gallons, we got to do these measurements in
the field because even though there's a lot of technology that
allows us to look at it from a satellite or a global
perspective, they have various ranges of accuracy. And so doing
it in the field is one of the most accurate ways to do it.
At this site, we measure that snow water equivalence snow
water equivalence, so see amount of snow you have in one spot if
you melt it into water. So it's the snow water equivalent. And
that's the fundamental holy grail parameter that we're after
if we knew how much water was spatially distributed over the
entire planet that would allow us to forecast spring run off
much better.
Water Resources are just so critical, especially out west.
And I think it's really cool to try to do the science to figure
out how much water we have I'm looking at the snow depth so the
height of the snow from the ground and I'm putting my ruler
in the same spot we took the other measurements so that we
can have two datasets and I also then look up and note if we have
a canopy kind of covering the surface, or intercepting the
surface, because that's an important note for our pilots
who are looking over and trying to measure the snow as well with
the airborne LIDAR.
So as part of SnowEx, we are conducting these airborne
experiments collecting accurate passive microwave radar data.
And we are only one part of the whole effort. You see the lines
down below? Lots of lines. I think that's essentially the
handiwork of the ground crew trying to validate measurements—
crisscrossing.
My name is Batu. I'm from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and
I am the PI for the SWISARR our instrument it's called Snow
Water Equivalent Synthetic Aperture Radar Radiometer. It's
very similar to have a bats transmit sounds waves as it's
flying around, and then listens to the echoes trying to make
sense of the world, the three dimensional world around it. We
do the same thing with just a microwave. So our waves travel
at the speed of light. They come back to the antenna, we collect
them and we process those echoes to make sense of the 3d world.
It is in conjunction with the ground measurements that the
field teams are doing. They're digging snow pits, and
collecting other snow observations for this to
validate what this radar and radiometer see.
We are walking to our snow pits and the tower radar instrument,
it's super cool. The surface temperature was minus 34/35
Celsius this morning. So coldest day of the campaign so far.
Yeah, this is the radar sensor. And so we'll compare this with
the ongoing flights of this campaign. This sensor is
particularly suitable for deep snow whereas some of the other
techniques are likely much more suitable for shallow snow. So
this is very complimentary. So this will take half an hour to
finish. So we do four of these transects. And this takes two
hours.
So they want to test instruments and all these different snow
environments to make sure that they work globally. Alaska
offers a perfect snow to do this type of test. We have a boreal
forest and Arctic tundra is very different. It's generally
shallow, but it's much harder. A lot of windblown features. And
the variability is amazing. So this a very different types of
snow. And it's important to see that the instruments for remote
sensing measurement of snow they do work well in, in this
different snow environments.
It is a massive effort in terms of like community participation,
we would never have all these measurements on the ground if
our crews were smaller. So the fact that we can get so many
people in one place to take measurements is really
meaningful.
The team has become really close. It takes a lot of
camaraderie and a lot of people pitching in you cannot stand on
your heels and watch what's going on out here. Everybody has
to pitch in and it makes for a really tight group
Working out in these conditions is is it's just physically
demanding. It's super cold. Here in the boreal forest, the snow
was very light and fluffy. And we were tromping around in the
woods on snow shoes. I mean really in the woods off trail
and was just very physically demanding.
I am amazed at how how much data was collected. You are an
incredible group of people. This was this was super just a super
opportunity and a really great experience to be part of so I
appreciate all of the hard work and it was not easy. I heard
somebody say like wow, you guys work really hard for this data.
And I thought... yeah this is a lot of work. So thank you very
much.