Airborne Snow Observatories, Inc.

Sign up on our website: https://buff.ly/3Q8uvE3 today!

Sign up on our website: https://buff.ly/3Q8uvE3 today!

This week we were excited to conduct our first ASO survey in Utah! Our flight operators Alex and Kat, caught some pictures of the beautiful Uinta Mountain headwaters from the air! We were able to add this basin this year thanks to support from Central Utah Water Conservancy District, the Colorado River Authority of Utah, and grant funding from the Bureau of Reclamation SNOWFO program. Stay tuned for two more surveys of this awesome basin throughout the spring!

The ASO snowpack monitoring and runoff forecasting program continues to deliver important data for decision-support and environmental research in Colorado. Our local, state, and regional stakeholder partners, demonstrate the value of ASO data and are working hard to sustain and expand the program and its applications. Check out this article in the Gunnison Country Times to learn more! https://buff.ly/43r6Y6l

Dust season has arrived in Colorado and it’s already affecting the snowpack. Upcoming ASO flights will help capture where the dust was deposited and quantify how much it is enhancing snowmelt. Check out this article in the Aspen Daily News to read more! https://buff.ly/3x8AUIm

Here is the link! https://buff.ly/43aINct

ASO CEO Tom Painter interviewed in a Los Angeles Times article about the recent blizzard that hit the Sierra! ASO will be in the air soon, helping CA assess the blizzard and what means for water supply. Here is the link: https://buff.ly/3T5ovwc

Airborne Snow Observatories, Inc. (ASO) is bringing a new, powerful perspective to measuring and monitoring our biggest water reservoir - the mountain snowpack. Conventional, station-based measurements (like SNOTEL) provide important, continuous monitoring at a small number of locations. While these stations form the backbone of our snowpack monitoring infrastructure, their locations in forest clearings within a narrow elevation range leave us blind to the the vast majority of the snowpack within a watershed. This is an important vulnerability, meaning we can have a good bit more or less snow in the watershed than indicated by the station data. ASO is filling this gap. Using technology and data workflows developed over nearly a decade at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ASO uses airborne laser and spectrometer mapping to provide accurate, high-resolution, and full-watershed maps of snow depth, snow water equivalent, and snow albedo. When combined with information from the SNOTEL network, we now have the necessary data resources to accurately capture the evolution of the seasonal mountain snowpack and to increase the reliablilty of runoff forecasting in changing climate and watershed conditions. Roaring Fork Conservancy is hosting this presentation with Dr. Jeffrey Deems, Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Formulation Lead at ASO, where we will explore this ongoing paradigm shift in our ability to monitor our snowpack reservoir, with examples and case studies from the Roaring Fork watershed, Colorado, and California. This presentation is free but registration is required at https://lnkd.in/g9CaGGmf  

We kicked off the 2024 ASO survey season on January 27 with flights over the Kings, San Joaquin, and Tuolumne River basins in California’s Sierra Nevada! Pictured here, we had both planes up in the air at once capturing the San Joaquin (N55A) and the Kings (N48Q). We’re now settling into a nice snowy stretch here in California, but we’re excited to be up in the air again - and with a 3rd plane - soon!

Wendy Ryan is #hiring. Know anyone who might be interested?