Video Transcript – Nasa SnowEx at Bogus Basin
Video Transcript
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[Allison Vincent, Hydrologic Sciences masters student]: The goal of Nasa SnowEx is to get an idea of how our snow is behaving in different places around the western U.S. And to ultimately find and test methods to better understand the water content of that snow. Boise State is supporting Nasa SnowEx out here up at Bogus Basin today by taking ground measurements. So we have a LiDAR flight that is happening today. So we try and get out here within, either on the same day or within a day on either side of when the flight occurs so that we can capture the conditions on the ground exactly as they are so that we can directly compare them with the data that’s being captured from the air.
Today we’re up here at Bogus Basin. We’re gonna be digging a snow pit. We dig into the snow all the way down to the surface and once we have that done, we take some samples of the snow and we look at the snow density. So that tells us the amount of water that’s in the snow.
[Isis Brangers, Ph.D student, Belgium]: 62 milimeters.
[Allison Vincent]: We also kinda go around our site and do some depth measurements just to see, you know, under the trees, out in the open, how’s the snow depth varying around our site.
[Man] 136!
[Allison Vincent]: Then we’ll also take some things like temperature readings and then just kind of look visually also at the stratigraphy of the snow. So, can we see any layering? What does that tell us about, you know what’s happened with the snow since the last time we’d been here. Has there been significant melting, freezing, thawing, that kind of stuff.
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[Isis Brangers]: Snow is important because more than a billion people on Earth rely on snow for water supply. So it’s in best interest for domestic uses for agriculture so by developing a method to measure snow depth we’re trying to improve water management methods. So that we can better simulate the runoff and when water will be available during the melting season. With climate change, summers are getting dryer and it’s important to manage the water resources we have in an intelligent way.
[Allison Vincent]: It’s really exciting to be a part of something that’s a lot bigger than yourself and to know that the research that we’re doing has real-world implications for people in Idaho, in the U.S. and really all over the world. That sense of being a part of something bigger than myself is really what I enjoy about research.
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