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Snow Depth to Get the NASA Treatment
17 August 2018 года
Snow Depth to Get the NASA Treatment
NASA is spearheading a multi-year, multi-agency effort to ascertain exactly how much snowthere is in the world.

The U.S. space agency’s SnowEx project has initially focused on two research areas in Colorado and California, trying to accurately measure how much snow cover there is at any one time and, essentially, how much water content that snow holds.

It is known that at its peak each winter snow covers around 31% of the earth’s land surface, but accurately measuring volume has proved much more problematic, especially as around half the snow covered area is ‘hidden’ by tree cover.

The SnowEx answer is to use a number of different measuring systems, including detecting radiation in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the visible to the microwave, to provide a solution.

Accurate water-content-of-snow data is seen as a ‘Holy Grail’ of global data collection due to the value of the water for agriculture around the world and also to record a key factor in climate change with more extensive snow cover seen as likely to slow global warming with heat reflected, whilst a smaller area with snow cover means more heat absorption. 

NASA’s aim is to study the effectiveness of the different measurement techniques being tested at the two research sites to design a future space mission which should accurately measure current snow cover and its water content in real time worldwide for the first time.

Source: fis-ski.com



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