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..........