Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with North Atlantic Coast Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK) is offering a funding opportunity to relationships with climate and avalanches as well as assist with remote sensing of snowpack properties. Understanding future changes in snowpack properties and avalanche frequency and magnitude serves to contextualize current and future avalanche behavior including a shift in avalanche regime from cold and dry to warm and wet. Additionally, it informs water resource managers on how best to adapt to declining snowpacks and become more resilient communities. Under a warming climate, destructive wet snow avalanches are an increasingly more frequent threat to humans yet are poorly understood. Are well positioned to further the understanding of changing snowpack properties and avalanche frequency given previous research experience. This proposed project will utilize recent regional avalanche-dendrochronology and snowpack modeling work (from USGS PI - E. Peitzsch) to project snowpack property and avalanche frequency changes and associated spatial landscape changes associated with large magnitude (extreme) avalanche events. The goal is to answer the following overarching question: How will snowpack properties and avalanche frequency and character change across space and time in the future and what are the primary drivers of this variability?