Researchers have completed the first flights of a NASA-led field campaign that is targeting one of the biggest gaps in scientists’ understanding of Earth’s water resources: snow.
NASA uses the vantage point of space to study all aspects of Earth as an interconnected system. But there remain significant obstacles to measuring accurately how much water is stored across the planet’s snow-covered regions. The amount of water in snow plays a major role in water availability for drinking water, agriculture and hydropower.
Enter SnowEx, a NASA-led multi-year research campaign to improve remote-sensing measurements of how much snow is on the ground at any given time and how much water is contained in that snow. SnowEx is sponsored by the Terrestrial Hydrology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The first year of the ground and air campaign takes place in February in western Colorado.
“This is the most comprehensive campaign we have ever done on snow,” said Edward Kim, a remote sensing scientist at NASA Goddard and the SnowEx project scientist. “An army of nearly 100 scientists from universities and agencies across the U.S., Europe and Canada are participating. Our goal is to find and refine the best snow-measuring techniques and how they could work together.”
Continue reading at NASA.
Photo via NASA.
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