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.