The Center for Snow & Avalanche Studies enhances the interdisciplinary investigation of the snow system's behavior and role in human/environment relationships by offering resources -- people, information, and facilities -- for field-based research and education.
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More CSAS News: '09/'10 | '08/'09 | '07/'08 | '06/'07 | '05/'06 | '04/'05 | '03/'04 | '02/'03
Major upgrades and maintenance projects were performed at our Putney Study Plot and the St. Paul Ski Lodge Base Station during the late summer, improving our radio telemetry system signal strength and enabling hourly polling of all the study sites. Additional opportunities to present the results of our dust-on-snow research were pursued, with our colleague Tom Painter and Andrew Barrett. In mid-winter, we were honored to host a fantastic opportunity for a small group of graduate students and researchers from all over the country to learn, hands-on, some very high-tech new techniques for snowpack characterization from a visiting Swiss scientist, perhaps the pre-eminent researcher on these methods. Our dust-on-snow monitoring program continued and found some quite unusual snowpack surface conditions. Thanks to a substantial, lingering snowpack, a field class from Great Britain had a very successful 10-day experience using our lower Senator Beck Basin Study Area terrain. Even in early June, participants in the MTNCLIM conference held here in Silverton were able to observe extensive dust-on-snow conditions throughout the state, and we had the opportunity to describe the Senator Beck Basin Study Area to a large audience of scientists and agency personnel interested in how climate change is already disturbing and will continue to affect mountain systems.