Engineering news
More than one-sixth of the world’s population depends on snow, from producing crops in spring to insulating plants in winter, and from cooling the planet – snow reflects up to 80% of the sun’s energy – to attracting tourism.
But climate change has caused a million square miles of spring snow – an area the size of Argentina – to disappear from the northern hemisphere in the past 50 years, altering food production patterns and forcing the closure of ski resorts.
In response, Nasa is improving remote-sensing technologies. These will be tested across many snow types – from mountains to tundra – to monitor their extent, duration and depth.
These efforts will combine aircraft sensors with ground-based lidar and modelling tools, among other things.
“Snow varies so much that no single sensor works for all types of snow and confounding factors,” Charles Gatebe, climate scientist and one of the SnowEx team leaders, told PE. “We will attempt to find the ideal combination to overcome multiple obstacles, including how to analyse snow hidden beneath forest canopies.”
Year one of the project – with a budget of £3.5 million – will see a team of scientists run a field and aircraft campaign in Grand Mesa, Colorado, a location that provides them with varying factors, from forest-dense spots to acres of plain snow cover “to determine at what point a sensing technique stops working,” said Gatebe.
Current remote-sensing capabilities are not adequate, according to Nasa. Methods include using aircraft to map sites, satellite scanners, and microwave sensors that respond to water and ice in the soil beneath the snow.
Once the SnowEx team packs up in Colorado after the snow has gone, the first year’s data will be analysed before moving on to the next location.