Welcome to Our Research Group
The Computational Mountain Studies research group focuses on snow and ice in the climate system, and how they melt and become water supply for communities and ecosystems. We are currently working on the following topics:
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Snow-forest interactions, based on the ideas that forests affect snowpacks and snowpacks affect forests;
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New snow metrics in a warming world including snow cover frequency, snow disappearance, date, the frequency of warm winters, and at-risk snow;
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Interactions of climate with mountain snowpacks and glaciers, and innovative ways to map these changes;
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The mountain-to-dryland continuum as a social-ecological system.
CMS NEWS
Congratulations to our 2024 Graduate!
Congratulations to Ally Fitts, who graduated in Spring 2024 with a MS in Hydrogeology from the UNR Graduate Program of Hydrologic Science
Her MS thesis involved two seasons of fieldwork in central Alaska, measuring snow reflectance and albedo in burned and unburned areas of boreal forest.
"Analyzing variations in post-fire snow albedo across spatial scales of observation".
Ally served as a summer intern at the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, CO and is now a federal employee working for the BoR.
Welcome Merlyn Krause
Our newest addition to the Computation Mountain Studies research group is Merlyn Krause, who recently graduated from UNR with a B.S. degree in Environmental Science. She will be using multispectral and hyperspectral data to compute metrics for moisture stress in the snowy mountain watersheds of the Sierra Nevada.
Mountain Rain or Snow: a NASA-funded citizen science project
"Mountain Rain or Snow" is a continuing citizen science project funded by NASA. It uses a web-based app your mobile device for you to record their location and the precipitation phase that is falling at that moment (rain, snow, or mixed).
It's really challenging to measure rain vs. snow using standard weather instruments and it turns out that people are the best "instruments" that we have!
Thousands of community observers are already helping us and you can too.
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Check out the MRoS app here:
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