As an MSU undergrad studying snow science, a summer internship might sound unlikely. Fortunately, snow is an invaluable resource year-round out here in the west, providing the majority of our water supply. My original project with the Henry’s Fork Foundation was to install snow monitoring stations across the watershed to better capture the spatial variability of its winter snowpack, however funding and approval has been backlogged. Luckily, my mentor ,Dr. Otto Lang, had another project in mind. 

Dr. Lang has been working with a model called “iSNOBAL”, which is used to predict and simulate future snowmelt. The model includes many different variables, one of which is the fraction of sunlight that is able to pass through to the ground, known as the “Sky View Factor” or SVF. SVF is heavily influenced by forest canopy, which in turn influences how much longwave radiation is able to reach the snow on the ground during the winter, affecting both accumulation and melt rates. Our project this summer aims to provide a new, more robust dataset that better captures the SVF of different forest types across the Henry’s Fork Watershed. I spent my first week working with QGIS to create different areas of canopy cover based on canopy height, density, and whether or not an area had been disturbed by the U.S. Forest Service (ex: thinning or logging). The next step was to go out and take pictures of the canopy in these different areas using a 360 camera. Taking pictures involved a lot of bush-wacking and not knowing which direction I was facing, which was a welcome challenge after a week of computer work. This week, I am rotating between smacking my face with tree branches and processing the images in the office, using a SVF calculator. 

The whole process has been really inspiring and fun, as I get to use something I created with GIS to actually collect data that will be implemented in real life. The life cycle of snow doesn’t stop when winter ends, and I am very grateful for the opportunity the foundation has given me to use my work to better the future of the Henry’s Fork Watershed.

This thing provides really flattering selfies

A screenshot of the lodgepole canopy types. All the colors in the candy store.

I was able to find some snow, and while no science was done on it, it was still pretty fun to ski down!