Latest News | New Technique Devised to Measure Water Held in Snowpacks, Could Help Manage Supply
Get latest articles and stories on Latest News at LatestLY. In a new research, scientists have come up with a new technique to measure the water held in snowpacks and for how long, after looking at nearly four decades of snowpack data in the US.
New Delhi, Mar 16 (PTI) In a new research, scientists have come up with a new technique to measure the water held in snowpacks and for how long, after looking at nearly four decades of snowpack data in the US.
Under a warming climate, snowpacks around the world have been documented to reduce over the past decades. Snowpacks, referring to the snow lying on the ground following snowfall, melt to provide water for drinking, irrigation and other purposes during dry months.
From local to regional scales, municipal and agricultural users of water need to balance demand with supply, and snow storage dramatically influences the timing of the supply side, according to Oregon State University (US) researcher David Hill, a professor of civil engineering.
The team explained that the metric builds on commonly used measurement known as snow water equivalent, or the amount of water snow left behind by snow upon melting.
"By considering the amount of water held in the snowpack and the amount of time the water is stored as snow, we are able to quantify water storage in different types of snowpacks," said doctoral student Christina Aragon, and corresponding author of the study published in the journal 'Hydrology and Earth System Sciences'.
"This includes persistent snowpacks, like we typically have at high elevations in the mountains; transient snowpacks, which are typically found at lower elevations; and snowpacks that are transitioning from persistent to transient due to climate warming," said Aragon.
Amidst changing climate, the snow water storage metric could become increasingly valuable for monitoring and predicting water resources, as it can be applied to multiple types of snowpacks, according to Aragon.
Through the metric, which the team called snow water storage, they measured a 22 per cent drop in the water held yearly in the mountain snowpacks of the lower 48 states in the US.
Hill said that the past several years in the lower 48 have seen a "feast or famine cycle of extremes when it has come to the where and the when of our snow and rain", adding that in general, snowpacks have considerably declined over the past 10 to 20 years.
"We present a new way of describing snow's water storage ability that adds deeper understanding and has more applicability in cases where our snowfall is increasingly intermittent or, regrettably, turning to rain," said Hill.
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)