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Colorado researchers work on better way to measure snow |
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Sunday, December 04, 2011 12:56 |
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Photo by Paul Aiken, Boulder Daily Camera
By LAURA SNIDER, BOULDER DAILY CAMERA
Despite the multitude of high-tech instruments now available to scientists to study the weather -- including an armada of satellites -- one measurement still remains relatively difficult to make.
Snow depth.
Measuring how much snow actually fell at any particular location during any particular storm is complicated by a number of factors. The first flakes of snow may melt away when they hit the relatively warm ground, or snowflakes may be whisked away by the wind, leaving some areas barren and others buried under deep drifts.
Now, researchers in Boulder are working on a better way to measure snow.
"It's actually a really big issue," said Ethan Gutmann, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "And it seems silly because you can just go out there and stick a ruler in the snow and measure how much snow is on the ground. The problem is, if you stick the ruler in the snow 10 inches over, you might get a very different answer. If you stick the ruler in the snow south of town, there might not be any snow."
Gutmann and his colleagues are testing a number of new snow-measuring devices both at NCAR's Marshall Field Site south of town and at the Niwot Ridge weather station northwest of Nederland.
Today, there are manual methods of measuring snow -- think ruler -- and automatic methods of measuring snow. Ultrasonic snow depth sensors, for example, essentially send out a pulse of noise and measure how long it takes for the sound waves to bounce back from the snow surface. But sounds waves can be altered by temperature and wind speeds.
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