Hi everyone,
It seemed as though we were heading into spring then, whammo, we got more snow dumped on us here on the North Olympic Peninsula. Oh well, at least we'll have snow to sample for the next few weeks. Me and my crack sampling team of one (Rebecca) hiked up to Deer Ridge for sampling on friday, Mar 6th. It was good to get the exercise and it wasn't too cold out either. We only had enough snow for sample at the top two sites, the rest were bare or only dusted. The weather station data seems to be more important though. We had a meeting with Andre from Battelle labs, he's one of the designers of the hydrologic forecasting model, and he stated that they haven't used the snow data as much as they've used the weather station data. The snow data is only used as a comparison for predicted depth while the met station data is downloaded as an input into the model. One of the interesting things I took from that meeting is that there are still some information gaps in the hydrologic modelling world, namely evapotraspiration rates. This was good news as gaps in data often equates to jobs for aspiring scientists. While there are general rates for ground cover type, there hasn't been much fine-tuning as far as evapotranspiration rates for different species types at different temperatures and levels of moisture. If I apply for a masters program at a later date, I think this is a project I would be interested in.
