 The snow lab is located here on Donner Summit, which is about three hours from the Bay Area. In addition to working here, I live here at the lab with my wife Megan and our two dogs. This lab was part of three labs initially built to study snow science in the western U.S. And so a lot of what we're doing here on site today is maintaining those past records that can give us a good idea of climate variability and how the climate is changing, as well as new research projects that we're embarking on to better understand our water resources. Our research site is just out in the back of the lab, which is terrific. I walk out the front door and within 20 to 50 yards, that's where all of our instrumentation is, from a whole host of different projects. This instrument is a present weather sensor and this tells us the difference between snowfall or rain as it's falling. It can identify that. What it does is from one side it actually emits some infrared light. The other side captures that and it can tell what shape it is and give us an indication of whether it's rain or snowfall. We have an increasing amount of rain on snow events here and those can cause flooding and fast melt of the snowpack and so it makes it a little bit hard to manage our water resources. The importance of this water can't be overstated in terms of ensuring that our trees aren't experiencing stress and our ecosystems are able to stay healthy with plant and animal life that they need to survive and snow melt contributes so much to our agriculture. The other thing too is we've had a development of a feedback loop with climate change between forest fires and our snowpack and effectively what happens is these fires burn these large areas and that can impact the way the snow melts and may increase the melt speed and our forest dry out sooner which can then result in greater forest fires again and our problem just keeps going in a big feedback loop and circle. So it's a vitally important resource that we need to keep track of. Our collaboration with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado is on a project called 3D Paws and that's a 3D printed sensor that's low cost and can be distributed across the world and is particularly useful in developing countries. This sensor here is kind of the grown up version of the 3D Paws sensor and it emits a sound pulse that hits the snow and bounces back and it can determine how high the snow is from the ground based off the time of travel from that sound pulse. That will give these areas a new way to really measure their water resources and ensure that they're able to track any type of water that they have on the ground throughout the snow season. The other reason this is perfect here is because we do get such deep snow so we can test it in a wide range of conditions. So the Snow Lab is absolutely a perfect place to test this 3D Paws sensor. I really want to increase the number of sensors that we have measuring snow depth because that can tell us so much about the available water resources that we have. I've been developing a citizen science project for about three years now. The idea is that we have this very inexpensive and very easy to access sensor package and you can take this, put it on your Wi-Fi network and it'll just send us the data and then anybody who wants to use that data can come on and look at it whether that be water managers, scientists doing research, or even just the general public that have a curiosity and want to participate in the science. Today I'm really excited to go visit with Mitzi Hodges. She's one of our first citizen scientists for this project that's coming up. Not just because she's passionate about it personally but because it really influences her companies that she owns. She has a snow removal company and a ski rental company and so it impacts all parts of her life in addition to being a personal interest. Or maybe attach a pole to it that the sensors could sit on and then they would just hang off the side here or if you wanted to just build a little pole that you could attach this to itself and stick it up there. To me it's not that I'm going to geek out on the scientific part of it. I want to know how much it actually snowed. So I love the fact that that's going to give us current time. I mean this is neat. I love it. It's really at the top of my list here at the lab to ensure that we have that symbiotic relationship and a balance in our service to the community as well as pursuit of these high impact science and research ideas. So that was 75, 68, 72. There is that amazing excitement when the storms first coming but then sitting down at the data that's another journey of discovery. What are you going to find and how is that going to impact or better the world that we're living in?