When can we play in the snow?

Well vehicle problems have plagued the NASA project for a while. The luxurious Ford Expedition should be back in action this week! As a few of my work crews in the past have said, “she is wearing some new dancing shoes,” meaning she has new tires, nice deep ones that should help keep the high center of gravity going where we want it. Hopefully Wednesday we will be back up in the Dungeness with the possibility of fresh snow it if has been cold enough. Our servitude to the park may also be called upon as well; weather permitting, we are going to gear up for another little hike off Hurricane Ridge to tackle that snow survey on Friday. Here is a photo from our last survey up there...work sucks :)



The public outreach side of things is going well for the NASA project. Last week Dwight, Shea and I attended a Dungeness River Management Team meeting to get the latest news on the model. The following day we met with the model developer to discuss things on a more technical scale. Speaking of technical, here is the latest podcast creation, though it is at the draft stage. Any comments appreciated. It is meant to be a bit more nerdy, sorry about that.

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GIS work is well…okay I am lazy. I have made some potential KML files, but need to get some descriptions attached to them so people know what they are looking at. Hope to accomplish a few of those soon. On the wildfire side of things, the progress is picking up steam, but still a bumpy ride…I am becoming very intimate with the various fire modeling platforms (FARSITE, FlamMap, BehavePlus) provided by our gracious federal agencies.

Finally, in an attempt to put some more fun into this blog. Do me a favor and check out the band Glasvegas. Their Pandora station is great and can’t wait to go somewhere and buy an album or two.

Rolling Up Into The Mountains

Hitting the snow sampling hard once again! Now that we have a weekly schedule outlined to hit all of our sites at least once every two weeks we have divided up into two crews. Rebecca and Shea take the Friday shift and Dwight and I take the Wednesday shift. The goal is to pay a visit to the sites that have been sampled the longest time ago.

Getting back into the groove of sampling didn’t take much. Last week, Dwight and I set out to attack the infamous BoJo snow course near Bon Jon Pass. This time last year we couldn’t have driven to the snow course without a snow machine or two, but we drove to the top with barely any slip in our Ford Expedition. The snow situation was dismal, BoJo gets the most snow of our intermediate sites and was nearly bare this go around, only getting a few points with measurable snow. Check out this graph of this year’s snow data compared to last year’s…not lookin’ so good.



On a sad note, the weather station at BoJo is down for unknown reasons. Dwight and I bench tested the HOBO there by swapping a couple of batteries, but the blinking lights that serve as the heart monitor were totally off…at this point I would be grateful for a blinking light next to the error indicator.

All other sites on the east side of the drainage checked out well, very little snow at all the other sites. Plus, the other four weather stations checked out okay and the roads were mostly bare and dry. Since we hit all of the low elevation sites before lunch, Dwight and I decided to hike up to Deer Ridge and get the rest of our sample sites, an unprecedented feat!

The inversion that Rebecca and Shea had was back and at the benches, I was sitting shirtless waiting for the sweat to dry from my clothes. Twenty minutes later, Dwight showed up huffing and puffing. Just after 1:00 we had a beautiful view of the Cascades so we decided to take a “safety nap” because we were way ahead of schedule. Trucking it up to Compensation point gave us no compensation…no snow there. However, Frozen Piggies had a few points with snow on them. The funny thing is that a deer has been tromping our sites up at Deer Ridge; how appropriate, yet a pain in the ass because it is reducing the snow at the site and creating holes that look similar to old sampling points.

I am currently reentering my hate phase of the love/hate relationship with GIS. I wish she would just leave me and make the pain go away, but that is another rant.

Brr...wish the lab was warmer.

Ahh…winter is deeply upon us. It’s cold, but the precip has been kind of lacking. No qualms here, in terms of hanging out in town. I have gotten to go running, biking and hiking while staying dry…well if you don’t count the fog and that it’s so cold I don’t sweat much. Speaking of riding bikes in town, winter is a pain in the ass because of the excess road debris from snow removal. All that sand on the shoulder of the roads hides all the glass that shreds your tires, get out there and clean it up county/city.

In terms of work, my class schedule restricts some snow sampling, but it looks like I can get at least one day a week out in the snow...possibly more. It’s been a while since I have picked up a snow tube or a calculator, let alone my snow shoes. On February 11, the PC NASA snow crew along with our think tank of smart guys at Batelle in Richland, WA will be presenting the Dungeness River Management Team with the working watershed model ,(wahoo!!!!) details yet to be discussed.

After talking more with Dwight about researchers’ needs and data resolution, we have decided upon a good scale to use when converting all of the Elwha GIS data into KML files. These files will be posted to the web for researchers to use and quickly examine spatial data. The format will be viewable in Google Earth, so those without expensive software can still see what is out there. On that note, I am using a GIS textbook as pleasure reading, it’s pretty enthralling: Remote Sensing for GIS Managers

Other research work right now is dropping road block after road block on the wildfire GIS hazard assessment. Dwight found an interesting article that might turn a block into a ramp (hopefully we won’t use it like Dukes of Hazzard and wind up in a worse situation). But I have that to go over as well as a BLM article that might give some other insights as to how to refine the study.

Main thing is I need to get off my ass and do some of this stuff.

Time to start...

It’s been a damn long time since I have posted a blog. So a little update on what I have been up to for starts. After finishing school in June (not just the quarter, but graduating from WWU) I got to stay in Port Angeles for a few months working and playing. At the end of July I started my seasonal roller coaster. I took a working vacation down to Costa Rica with Dwight to aid in GIS research at the La Selva research station. After returning, I had one day to prepare for my next job.

After digging out last year’s work gear, I packed a few bags and got on a plane headed for NorCal to work for the US Forest Service once again under TEAMS Enterprise. My seasonal job last year included painting and counting trees, this year was assumed to be the same. I spent three weeks in Willows, CA marking a timber sale on the Mendocino NF. At the end of that tour of duty, I was assigned to spend three weeks in Wyoming (wahoo!). However, during my time off between tours I was reassigned to Tennessee…

When I arrived in TN, we were doing a job for an Army ammunition plant doing a timber inventory. That job put me in Milan, TN for two three week tours. Just as the job was finishing I started to make plans of how to spend my time off before heading back to school in Port Angeles. Luckily, I was asked to work in Big Bear Lake, CA on the San Bernardino NF. After two days back home I flew south to count twigs. Yes, twigs! We did fuel inventories the forest needed for a NEPA decision concerning a thinning project.

Finally my season with the Forest Service was over and I could take a vacation, for about a month. I traveled to Bellingham, Portland, and moved back to Port Angeles. After the move I spent two weeks in Tahoe with my brother for the holidays.

So now I am back to work with the REU working on the snow surveys and converting Elwha GIS data into more publicly accessible formats. This winter I am also working with Dwight off of a grant we received from FM Global to further refine the wildfire hazard study we conducted last spring…So here goes nothin’.

Melting Snow and Frying Brain

Spring is starting to poke its pretty face around the Peninsula! Work is getting easier with the snow courses because, what, they are gone! Shea and I were living the High Life last week when we drove to the trailhead, packed our snowshoes all the way to Deer Ridge and found no snow. Our one north aspect snow course had snow, but not even on all 5 points. The bummer about the trip is that we went up there to replace a weather station that was on the fritz. It turns out that it was on the fritz because someone cut the wire for the precip gauge, or maybe we did somehow.

The rivers are running pretty high right now, it is interesting to see them so full and for it to be sunny at the same time. That’s not the only thing that is full right now. I wish that I could coast to graduation like I had planned, enjoy my one class, make some bucks…but it is more like an uphill sprint with a yeti on my ass. Soon it will all be over, or at least the stuff with strict time requirements will be.

I am looking forwardish to this weekend. It is kind of stressful, to lose that kind of time to work on other things, but for natural history we are traveling to Mt Rainier for two and a half days. What we will do there in the snow, I don’t know, but I hope it’s fun.

No snow work last week, but to back track a bittle (that’s not a typo, it’s a combo of bit and little). We did kick the Dungeness’s ass a few weeks ago. Dwight said “we will make it if we have to hike from Slab Camp!” and guess what we did. We did just that. We drove until we were scraping in more than one place, then rolled down onto a clear spot…little did we expect getting stuck on bare ground, but we did. The come along got its first work out and it makes me wish we had more tow straps for events like that, it was way easier than pushing and digging to get it out.

We did a momentous hike up the trail from slab camp with some nice views. When we made it up to the top of Deer Ridge it started to snow, it was very wet nasty snow. Because of the warming we have had recently, snowshoes were a must after the set of benches on the ridge. It was more like walking in frozen yogurt, but we got to the top and did our work. For some reason it felt really cold up there, but the met station said it was just below freezing. Well the met station might be wrong, apparently sometime in April it went kablooey on us, the RH sensor read a consistent -200%. So we were met with a boisterous error light flashing in our faces. We reset the met station and how our RH sensor doesn’t even show up. Of course, the expensive piece of technology fails on the most remote location. We did dig a snow pit and collect some samples for bacteria analysis...as boring as that sounds, it is pretty interesting. Just a side note for all of you who go up to Deer Ridge. It is faster to take the trail down than the road...by far.

Not all technology is worth bitching about. Dwight and I finally got to go to the WAURISA (GIS) conference in Seattle. After a little planning fiasco, I was able to sneak in and spend my birthday in a workshop about project management for GIS, skills I probably won’t need until I am about 35. Hopefully I can use what I learned to appeal to someone who is 35+ and has something I want. Above all, the food was the best part of the conference, while we were there we had Mexican, Thai, and sushi…as well as realizing the beauty behind top shelf tequila, and not in a “get crunk” kind of way.

At the conference there were some interesting ideas presented, met some pretty good contacts and presented the wildfire work. I took second in the student presentation…once again the UW grad students took top honors. I kind of look forward to going into a masters program so I can beat undergrads. All in all I learned quite a bit and had a good time…next conference, San Diego...maybe?

It's raining, it's snowing.

Well, all is quiet on the REU front. We have been working on the google mash up to present at the GIS conference, well Dwight has been working on it and I have been gathering some info. It looks like we can make it as robust as we want or as simple as we want.

In the mean time I have been working on my student presentation for the GIS conference. After presenting to the Clallam County Sheriff’s Department, I got some ideas for some changes to make and a little strike of confidence that I actually know what I am talking about.

The weather is starting to get nice, emphasis on the start portion. Cabin fever hasn’t quite set in because I can get out once in a while, but I would like to go out and see something new. Speaking of getting out, following the previous snow storm we had a few weeks ago in April, we have been unable to get up to our snow courses because 20 inches of new fell in a weekend! Tomorrow we will kick the Dungeness’s ass and get up to Deer Ridge, and hopefully make it back before dark.

We will see how next week’s conference goes. If nothing else it is going to be a nice trip to Seattle, celebrate Cinco de Mayo, take in a Mariner’s game and enjoy some more free food, probably no free beer this time.