SnowSensor

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SnowSensor is a low cost sensor system for long duration snow surveys. Monitoring continuous changes in snow pack is critical for many aspects of water resource management, hydrology, climate change and ecology. While manual snow surveys have traditionally been used to measure snow, their high costs and ineffectiveness to continuously monitor snow pack conditions can lead to inaccurate detection of snow peak accumulation and disappearance, and biased estimation of ablation rates. The system was developed in collaboration with Markus Weiler from the Institute of Hydrology at Freiburg University and Andres Varhola from the Forest Science Centre at UBC.

The low cost of the system allows to deploy a large number of sensors at a research site, ensuring good coverage. This is critical since snow accumulation and ablation rates are subject to local factors, like terrain angle, shadowing effects etc.

Each SnowSensor is a stand-alone system, providing:

• ultra sonic range finder for determining snow height
• thermometer for air temperature
• relative humidity sensor
• integrated power supply for winter long deployment
• integrated data-logger for more than 4500 measurements
• freely programmable measurement intervals
• TTL input for tipping bucket rain gauge
• expansion port for additional digital sensors

Deployment:

• Summer 2010 in Greenland (3 sensors)
  Asa Rennermalm, Department of Geography, State University of New Jersey
• October 2009 to March 2010 in the Cedar River Watershed, Washington, USA (10 sensors)
  Jessica Lundquist, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington
• Winter 2008/09 in British Columbia, Canada (60 sensors)
  Andres Varhola, UBC Forestry

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