Welcome back my legion of cyberfans!

I apologize for making you wade through my many typographical errors in the preceding posts. I hadn't read them after posting, and didn't realize how many mistakes there were. Anyhow, I know how dedicated my readers are, and I'm sure you're all more than willing to put up with some minor errors. So.....after participating in the adaptive management areas, my next REU project was the NASA solutions network. I know that everyone is waiting to hear more about the NASA project, but first we'll have to take a small detour. The NASA project started slow and, to be honest, has continued slowly. So, we had a peripheral project to work on; the Dungeness Auquifer Recharge Project. I worked under Ann Soule, the Clallam County Hydrogeologist, on this one. As, some of you may know, much of the irrigation ditches in the Dungeness Prairie were converted to piped irrigation for the purposes of water conservation. The irrigation ditches leaked a significant amount of water, which was eliminated by piping. There were a number of created wetland ponds and wells which recieved their water from this leakage. The recharge project was designed to discover what the minimum amount, and optimum location, of intentional release water was required to maintain those wetlands and wells at their previous levels. To discover this, water was released at three different sites in the Carlsborg area from late may to early july. We then monitored select well sites located near these releases by taking weekly hand measurements or by automated transducer. These measurements occured from early April to mid August. The project is still ongoing, and results are inconclusive at this time. The most important part though, is that I was able to practice and improve my skills at taking electric tape well measurements, collect nitrate samples, work with GIS, and make a poster. The GIS portion of the poster, showing the layout of release and well sites, is attached. Be sure to check back in, I've still got the NASA project dangling.

Some of my REU background

Hi again cyberfans!

Field research is a little slow right now, kinda like the calm before the storm. So far it looks like my team will be doing some data collection and ground-truthing after the snow flies. So until then, I'm going to talk a little bit about my past REU experiences. The REU program has been very influential in keeping me interested in continuing my college career as well as helping to fund it. For the last two years, come spring time, I've considered junping ship from college back to the job market. However, I've been enticed back by the opportunity to do some of the coolest research around while getting funding to offset my increasing debt. For my first REU course, I wasn't so lucky, I had to pay for it rather than getting paid for it. In the summer of 2005, I enrolled in a forest ecology field research course with Dr. Dan Underwood. It was originally supposed to be on the Elwha but was changed at the last minute due to logistics. I was a little upset over the change at the time but in retrospect, it turned out to be a good thing. Since then I've gotten to do a lot of research an field work relating to the Elwha and its dam removal project. Because of the change that summer, I got to do research and data collection in a few of the Jerry Franklin designed adaptive management forestry areas. Some of you may be familiar with the adaptive management areas from following the spotted owl issue in the 1990's. The result of the spotted owl controvery was the creation of the Northwest Forest Initiative which halted commercial logging on federal land in the Northwest in order to provide habitat for the spotted owl. The adaptive management areas are experimental efforts to create old growth conditions in previously logged areas as quickly and efficiently as possible. Some of the data collection procedures we undertook were soil sampling for nitrate, respiration , and DNA analysis, vegetation trasects, along with tree cores, DBH, and height. The study was intended to monitor the effects of the forestry practices in the different stands on the vegetation and soil microbiology. Anyhow, my experiences with that first study led me to the Natural Resource Management program at Peninsula College and eventually to the Huxley Bachelor of Environmental Science program. Tune in next blog to see what my next research steps were.

Water forecasting technology

Before I begin talking about the new water budget hybrid model that will be used for water forecasting in the Dungeness watershed, I should try and familiarize all my cyber fans out there with some of the technology being used. Today I'm going to talk a little about SNOTEL. Anything that seems a little confusing or hard to understand is probably where I've diverged from the truth and just started making things up. Don't worry though, I usually find my way back to legitimate information, you'll just have to read carefully. SNOTEL stands for SNOwpack TELemetry and it is a system used to collect snowpack and related climatic data. SNOTEL uses meteor burst technology to collect data from sensor sites and and communicate that data in near real-time. They do this without the use of satelites by bouncing VHF signals off of the ever present band of ionized meteorites hanging out at around 50 to 75 miles above the earth and collecting the data at two master statins in Boise, Idaho and Ogden, Utah. There are more than 730 sites in eleven western states all operated by the National Resource and Conservation Service. Basic SNOTEL sites have a pressure sensing snow pillow, storage precipitation guage, and an air temperature sensor. They can, however, accept up to 64 channels of data. For our purposes, we'll be using them for snowpack water content. There are currently three SNOTEL sites in the Olympic Mountains and another is being proposed for the headwaters of the Elwha River. There is rumor that your cyber hero, me, may get to go up in a helicopter during the SNOTEL site evaluation. I'll keep you all posted.

NASA meeting

I was finally able to meet one of the NASA representatives yesterday at the college. It was interesting to see that the folks at NASA are really more concerned with the Solutions Network being formed to create a new water budget for the Dungeness watershed than with the water budget itself. Maybe I should back up here for a minute, if your unfamiliar with the NASA project here on the beautiful North Olympic Peninsula, this is where I should probably tell you a little bit about it. Water predictions for the Dungeness watershed have been made using a historical regression model. This model takes snowpack, instream flow, and rainfall data which it then compares to the respective historical data to determine what the future water availability will be. This has work o.k. so far, because the water demands were low enough that the inacuracies of the model didn't cause a whole lot of problems. However, with the growing demand for water in the Dungeness watershed and the increasing unpredictability caused by global climate change, a new model is needed. One of the motivators to get a new water budget model in place was the late summer drought of 2005. In August of that year irrigation diversions had to be shut off in order to provide enough instream flow volume for migrating Salmon to make their way upstream.
In order to get this new water budget in place a network of agencies needed to be formed and new technology needed to be accessed. This is where NASA comes in. Mike Dougherty and Tony Ingersoll courted the help of NASA Earth Sun Science program in order to gain access to better technology and get aid in forming a Solutions Network which would coordinate multiple agencies across a broad spectrum in order to implement the water budget model in an expedient and efficient manor. I've got an organic chemistry class right now so I'll have to tell you about the model later. Trust me, it's pretty cool.

Who am I?

Hi cyberfans,
My name is Shea McDonald and I'm fortunate enough to be getting paid real money to do very important research on the Elwha Damn Removal project. So far I've partaken in field data collection with researchers from the U.S.G.S., Eastern Washington University, and the Olympic National Park. I've also participated in the Dungeness aquifer recharge project which is connected, somewhat, to a new water budget model being developed for the Dungeness and Elwha watersheds using NASA technology. That's right, I said NASA, and if you keep reading I'll probably say it again. More to come..........