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Sam Pruitt

Sam Pruitt
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Sam Pruitt

From River Bottoms to Mountaintops

For the first half of my internship, it was unclear if we would get to install the snow monitoring stations. With only three weeks left in my internship, the parts arrived, the permitting was approved, and I am happy to say that we have three stations in the ground! Dr. Lang, Joe, and I were like three kids on Christmas opening up all the boxes, only a little more careful due to the fragility of their contents, which were basically metal Legos. Sensors, dataloggers, wires, four billion U-bolts, the towers themselves, all kinds of fun stuff. I had no idea what was under the skin of one of these stations, and it was really cool to learn how they log and transmit data. After we did a dry run in the parking lot, we set out to dig these things into the ground. As of now, Island Park Reservoir, Madison Plateau, and Teton Pass have new snow stations ready to roll!     While I don’t fish as much as the rest of the foundation, Ashton was a pretty cool place to be. With only an hour and a half drive to Grand Teton National Park, I was able to

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Sam Pruitt

(Almost) Snow-less Snow Science

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

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