Arizona State University and Salt River Project are working together with Airborne Snow Observatories, Inc. on an innovative project to measure snowpack across the Arizona watershed -- providing crucial data for improving water management.
For the first time, a collaborative research team is using airplanes equipped with state-of-the-art scanning lidar and imaging spectrometers, along with innovative computational modeling from ASU, to measure snowpack to determine how much water it contains. The airborne technology was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The findings will help Arizona public power utility SRP more accurately forecast runoff into the seven reservoirs that supply water to more than 2.5 million Valley residents.
The ASO, Inc. flights will focus on the basin areas upstream of the Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in the Upper Black River Basin area near New Mexico. The plane will fly across the entirety of the basin several times during the five- to six-hour flight. Depending on weather, three flights are scheduled through March.
The data collected during the flights will be analyzed and used to test hydrologic forecast models developed by ASU professor Enrique Vivoni with the ASU School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment.
“Mapping snow cover with these airborne technologies is a first of its kind for the state of Arizona,” said Vivoni, also with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. “We are excited about using snow maps in forested regions of the Salt River to improve runoff forecasts and train algorithms that apply artificial intelligence.”
SRP uses a variety of tools to measure snow water equivalent across the 13,000-square-mile watershed, which has historically been challenging to measure precipitation and runoff due to rapidly changing snowpack conditions in the forested regions.
“This project is so critical because it will enable SRP to strengthen our measurement tools and provide more accurate data as we manage the reservoirs and the 260 billion gallons of water that are delivered annually to the Valley,” said Bo Svoma, SRP Climate Scientist and Senior Meteorologist.
An SRP snow survey will provide additional information to complement the data gathered from the ASO, Inc. flights. SRP crews will be on the ground measuring the snow water equivalent and depth, and flying over snow markers to estimate depth at many locations.
The project was made possible by a United States Bureau of Reclamation grant to ASU’s Center for Hydrologic Innovation and a joint research project funded by SRP’s Innovation and Development Program, which funds research projects at Arizona universities on a variety of topics important to SRP.
The Arizona Water Innovation Initiative, a statewide project that rapidly accelerates and deploys new approaches and technologies for water, is also supporting the project. ASU professors, researchers and students are working closely with SRP engineers on projects that could improve SRP’s power and water operations.
The ASO team will rapidly process that data to generate spatially complete maps of the area’s snow.
ASO pioneered the technology for snowpack mapping with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2013.
ASO, Inc. uses an airborne remote sensing system to measure snow properties, including snow depth, how much water is stored in the snowpack, and snow reflectivity. Each of these properties varies across landscapes and changing environmental conditions, such as precipitation, wind and temperature.
The airborne measurements are used in snowpack hydrology models to track the snowpack evolution over the season and to forecast snowmelt runoff.
