Airborne Snow Observatory: Measuring Snow Water Equivalent

Maps from NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory mission recently gave water resource managers in California precise information about snowpack and water availability that they have always wanted but never had before. The snowpack maps enabled them to achieve near-perfect water operations during the driest year in California history. The data-gathering technology aboard the observatory could improve water management for 1.5 billion people worldwide who rely on snowmelt for their water supply. The observatory's two instruments measure two properties most critical to understanding snowmelt runoff and timing. A scanning lidar system measures snow depth with lasers to determine the first property, snow water equivalent. Snow water equivalent represents the amount of water in the snow on a mountain. It is used to calculate the amount of water that will run off. An imaging spectrometer measures the second property, snow albedo. Snow albedo represents the amount of sunlight reflected and absorbed by snow. Snow albedo controls the speed of snowmelt and timing of its runoff.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] there's an enormous void in our quantitative knowledge of the Mountain snow pack and pressure is being put on us increasingly to be able to know that Mountain snow pack because it is our primary resource for [Music] water so when you fly over the mountains

00:00:50 you can see snow down there and no snow over there but you have no idea how deep the snow is or how fast it's melting the Airborne snow Observatory gives you the information on every patch of snow as to how deep it is and how fast it's melting and that's key information for water managers for ranchers for Farmers for boers the list goes on and [Music]

00:01:23 on here born snow Observatory is two instruments put together that look look at the surface that tell us how deep snow is and how much sunlight that snow absorbs and those two combined are what control how fast water comes out of the mountains and how much of that water comes out of the mountains from snow we need a mission like the Airborne

00:01:52 snow Observatory because we very poorly know how much snow there is in the world's mountains and how fast that melts and comes out of out those Rivers the Airborne snow Observatory is providing a wall-to-wall complete characterization regularly through the snow melt season so this is this is the future of of water management in snowmelt fed regions

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