The snow that falls in the mountains is good for more than just skiing, snowshoeing and breathtaking vistas.
The snow that falls in the mountains is good for more than just skiing, snowshoeing and breathtaking vistas. The snowpack it creates will eventually melt, and that water can be used for hydropower, irrigation and drinking water.
Researchers want to predict how much water we will get later in the year based on the snowpack. But in forested regions, the trees impact the calculations. When falling snow is intercepted by trees, it sometimes never makes its way to the ground, and the current models struggle to predict what will happen.
To improve the models and investigate what happens to this intercepted snow, University of Washington researchers created a citizen science project called Snow Spotter. Participants viewed time-lapse photos from Colorado and Washington and labeled photos taken when trees had snow in their branches. This information provided the first glimpse of how snow-tree interactions could vary between climates and how that could affect predictions of summer water supplies.
Read more at: University of Washington
In a citizen science project created by UW researchers, participants viewed time-lapse photos from Colorado and Washington and labeled photos taken when trees had snow in their branches. Shown here is a time-lapse image from a camera on the AmeriFlux Tower in Niwot Ridge, Colorado. This image is archived in the PhenoCam network and is one of the images citizen scientists analyzed in this project. (Photo Cedit: AmeriFlux Tower)
