Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
Check out the interactive map of all our Snow Spotter sites here!. Thank you for your efforts! We've completed our project! To browse other active projects that still need your classifications, check out zooniverse.org/projects
Research
With your help, our Mountain Hydrology research group hopes to better understand and model forest-snow interception patterns. Your help gives us insight on the amount of water resources that will be available for the dry season.
Our Snow Spotter project takes a citizen science approach, where our data comes from citizen scientists, like you! The workflows on our website show different time-lapse images of snowy areas around the United States, Switzerland, and Finland. Citizen scientists will determine the amount of snow that they see in the tree canopy.
Check out the interactive map of our project sites here.
During the winter season, the development of the mountain snowpack plays a dominant role in water availability during the summer and fall. Forest cover has a large impact on this development, as trees intercept up to 60% of snow that would normally integrate with the snowpack below. Once snow is intercepted by forests, it can unload into the snowpack below through melting and sluffing, or, if it remains in the canopy for long enough, it can sublimate (transitioning directly from a solid to a gas) back into the atmosphere. Sublimation can result in up to 25-45% of intercepted snow being released back into the atmosphere, resulting in significant effects on snowpack depth, and therefore, on water availiability. The following gif shows the difference in the development of the snowpack depth under these two processes.
This process is difficult to observe as it occurs in remote areas across a vast spatial distribution. Zooniverse provides a platform where we can quickly and efficiently create a data set to mediate this problem, capturing canopy snow across both time and space. As we continue to upload images, Snow Spotter participants help to grow this data set so that it may be available for future research.
One way scientists have used this data is to evaluate snow-unloading models, which receive incoming data from weather stations or meteorological models to generate estimates for the amount of snow stored in the canopy. Snow Spotter data collected by participants on Zooniverse provides an observational data set through which these models can be evaluated. Models such as these are essential for our understanding of hydrologic processes, and will ultimately influence our ability to manage water resources responsibly.
When you’re ready to join this project, head to the workflows on our main page! If you have any questions, check out our frequently asked questions page, ask them in the talk section of the project, or reach out directly to @jcramblitt.