 Photo of Dr. James Church--l ikely in the vicinity of Mt. Rose |
Our information about the amount of water in a snowpack comes from at least two sources--the Natural Resources Conservation Service's Snow Telemetry (SNOTel) system and snow surveys (see http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/SNOTEL_brochure.pdf). Dr. James Church, a professor of classic languages at the University of Nevada, developed techniques for measuring the water content of snowpacks based on the mass of a core extracted using a tube. The technique is based on the mass of a cubic centimeter of frozen water, which is slightly less than the mass of a cubic centimeter of liquid water.
Church developed the Mt. Rose sampler--a coring tool with a scale that translates mass into inches of water. See a photo below of Church at work (courtesy of the Natural Resources Conservation Service's Snow Measurement web site (http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snowcourse/sc-hist.html).
The Mt. Rose sampler is in common use for estimating the water content of the snowpack in snow courses. Snow courses consist of many cores taken in a line for some distance. Nevada's Mt. Rose Ski Resort has one of the original snow courses from early surveying work and a SNOTel site. For recent data from the Mt. Rose Ski Resort snow course see http://1.usa.gov/1gJ0RM4.
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