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.

A conference and some acronyms

Well it’s a little late, but I wanted something juicy to write about.

We are getting socked with some winter weather right now. Hail, snow, wind. It’s a nice last hoorah, but will it ever end?

I got to attend the Western Snow Conference in Hood River, OR this week with Dwight, Erin and Shea. Needless to say, we learned a lot about snow. The whole climate change idea is a big deal to them (duh) and it looks like there are lots of resources and approaches to dealing with it…or at least describing the impacts and predicting them. One of the more notable presentations was about the impacts of snow depth and density on wildlife in terms of predator/prey interactions. It was presented by a guy who did his first snow survey before most of the people in the room were even born.

We met lots of interesting characters and drank lots of good brews at Full Sail…well the interesting characters were usually in the hot tub. There was a good field trip up and down the gorge on Thursday. We got a tour of Bonneville dam and locks, Crown Vista, ate lunch at the top of Multnomah Falls and got a nice nap on the tour bus…then drove home to PA.

Snow stuff on our end is carrying on…Still getting to go out, go hiking and collect data points and downloading met data. Also, working with the PUD is pretty fun, lots of GIS work and a little bit of inturd data entry, not a bad gig. I am learning a bit about CAD too.

My one class, Natural History of the PNW had our first field trip today. We were a bit snowed in and could not go out to the Soleduc to check out the forest. Instead, we just hit up Heart o the Hills on the way to Hurricane Ridge and froze our feet off (standing around in the snow is not very fun). Then we got some moss and lichen samples and keyed them out back at the lab on campus, not too bad for a snow day.

Well back to work, quite a bit to do revolving around GIS. At least it’s crappy weather this weekend.

Last shout out for winter.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Well this has been one of the fastest quarters of my college “career.” Maybe that is because I only took one class.

The last few weeks have been pretty uneventful. All of the weather stations are out (except #7 which might not be launched at Louella); which means we have been adding data collection to our tasks in the woods. Our days in the woods are getting shorter and shorter as the daylight grows longer and longer. The snow level keeps going up, we can drive more so there is less hiking.

Our trip to Deer Ridge last weekend was more like the hike into one of the easy sites. We had done nearly all of our snow courses before lunch, including the three mile uphill hike.

Back in the lab, we are still sending out the data we collect, even though most of it is zeros….but zero is still a data point as Master Dwight says.

The weather has been awesome for us. A little bit of snow or light rain here or there, but the weather is always better than down in PA.

We have been taking lots of photos and video in the past few outings to prepare for our vidcast. She and I have written some scripts, made some drafts and ended up with a badass vidcast. Dwight knows the concept of “work smarter, not harder” and asked us to finish our vidcast in time for the Dungeness River Management Team meeting and used that as part of his presentation. Sounds like it was well accepted.

Next week is the Elwha Research Consortium meeting. Luckily, I get to ditch part of it for work. Then we get to have a dinner with researchers, learn about the projects going on in the Elwha, then I think I will be taking off sometime on the 26^th to go to Tahoe!

A few bruises and a campfire.

So in the past two weeks we have had a few milestones on the hydro project. Well they might not be mile stones, but at least some accomplishments.

Our pseudo spring has brought little precip and warmer temps to the area. Great for being in town and hanging out, but up in the mountains little snow is falling. What is up there partially freezes and makes it difficult to get around. So we have been hiking more and added XC skis to the repertoire. I have never skied before, but the bruises are going away.

This week we launched 6 weather stations. They are tripods with a metal mast, attached to the mast is a temp/RH sensor, a precipitation gauge (tipping bucket) and a HOBO data logger. The sensors are read and stored every 5 minutes. We will be retrieving the data every time we visit the snow course. Also this week, we visited every one of our sample sites, including the deer ridge transect. Yes, we hauled the 60+ lbs of weather station to the top, but we were greeted with an awesome view.

Up there, Dwight wanted to do a little experiment and see how much snow was on the northern aspect of the ridge, about 20 meters away from one of our other snow courses. A tip for everyone out there, take your snow cores uphill from you…I tried to do one downhill, with a 55 inch or so snow core, I pushed it into the ground and buried my knuckles into the snow and my body kept on going and had a little endo action…with a nice recovery while on snow shoes.

I have been spending some time reflecting on our work also. This week I made a draft of my podcast, which I need to figure out how to link up to the blog. Also, Shea and I made a vidcast of our work. We will be showing these in class this week.

An unscheduled treat came along as well. Andy Bach and the geography crew came over from WWU for a water resources trip. I met up with them at the Lyre River Campground for a few beers and a bonfire. We discussed the highlights of Bellingham, being plagued with always having to know where we are, talked about weird places in California, and ate lots of things that we cooked in the fire.

Two more weeks left in the quarter. I want out.

Stuck in the snow, not behind a computer.

Snow sampling continues as the winter moves on…Storms come and go in the mountains and down in town, but the cold isn’t always coming with it. Not a big deal to drive in the rain, but it makes pretty unfavorable driving conditions up in the snow. Last week, Dwight, Shea and I spent over an hour getting the Jeep unstuck, turned around pointed downhill. After that we got a nice hike in the sun up the hill to BoJo. Once we got there we had a quick lunch and took our samples. On the way back we got dumped on by some driving fluffy snow. After sampling at The Lounge about two inches accumulated.

Our sampling structure has been changed as we have made the Deer Ridge transect permanent, we will go on a three day sampling cycle hitting the mid, high, and transect sites…which now all have maps to accompany them…check out the study area map.

Finally I was able to get the aerial photo adjusted to fit onto a GPS, but getting it to appear in the program is another story. Still working on that one.

It’s a bummer to miss the trip to Newport with the nearshore group (but I do get to make some maps for them to use in presentations). The snow crew gets to go to Hood River, OR for the Western Snow Conference to present a little bit of the NASA work as well as our analysis of the Deer Park snow course and the affect of the 1988 fire and snow interception…we started to look at that, but normalizing it for climate data might be a challenge.

Also we are looking into attending and presenting at the Washington GIS Conference in Seattle.

Snow, sand, and spending time in the lab

Things have been swell since my last blog update. I shoved my arm farther up the beast that is the REU program, but it is a good thing. I am trying this blog directly from Picasa, my new discovery through Google, their photo uploading/sharing program.

The hydro project is in full swing. We got approval to do our Deer Ridge Transect, which Shaylee so endearingly called "Walking uphill, in the snow, eating sticks." We (along with Gus and Dwight) hiked a few miles up the Deer Ridge trail on a beautiful winter day, after spending an hour or so getting the Jeep unstuck, and after I lost my keys in the snow.

Our jaunt up the hill was pretty decent, a few good outcrops to catch some rays and get a GPS fix, had lunch at a few benches planted in the snow and snow shoed the way to the spine of the ridge to start surveying. We got three courses on the way down and one at the road, where we recorded our low temp for the day, in the middle upper 20's (27 or something). A brisk day none the less because there were no clouds, but because there were no clouds we could see the Cascades which Gus enjoys to insult. In the photo above, they are behind our heads, and was probably the most cloudy part of the day until we drove off into the sunset.

Since my last blog, we also discovered that some of the sample sites we thought were useful were more or less usampleable, "Salal Hell" for obvious reasons and another unnamed site because there was too much veg to get a good snow course in. Instead we setup one on a quarry so aptly named "Rocky Squirrel," another one in the redneck camping area called "Foxworthy"...the quarry could have gotten the same namesake because of the rusted out BBQ we found there. Dwight also got to name one of our other sites "Vampire" because a branch over the trail attacked the poor old man and made him bleed.

After last week's Elwha Nearshore Consortium meeting Melanie and I were finally able to meet with the elusive Jon Warrick of USGS, the geologist behind the sediment project. Her and I did some math that morning and figured out that it would take about 750 hours to process all of the sediment photos we had, plus data analysis time...not a chance. So we explained the predicament to Jon and he cut our work way down, instead of taking 216 measures per photo we went down to 20 and decided not to analyze half of the photos because substrate photo analysis hasn't been perfected...but that just means that the sieving will be giving us that data...have fun Ben & Tiff!

Mel and I were able to get a new spreadsheet made to fit our needs and get a few photos analyzed. We checked one to make sure her and I measured consistently, we compared our mean grain sizes and were only off by a pixel, which amounts to 0.3 mm go us!

Now that we are getting some snow data, we are able to process that using GIS...well at least we are still working on that. We are about to the point of having our sites picked out but the GPS data collection process has yet to be streamlined, let alone finalized. Every time we go out we are bringing an updated data dictionary. We should have things figured out by the time the snow melts, hopefully. In the mean time I am getting pretty close to our GIS and GPS software. I have yet to have them visit me in my dreams, but after a few breakthroughs this week that are comparable to finding a cure for cancer after the frustration I have had, we are close to putting our background photos into the GPS units...easier said than done.

Going out and getting my hands dirty...I mean wet.

One of the great things about the REU program is that you are not just boxed into one project. A few weeks ago, Dwight asked for volunteers to go out on a NOAA project that was placing salmon carcasses in the Elwha to study marine derived nutrient diffusion. I figured, why not, it is field time doing something I had never done before. That worked in the past when I put on the dry suit and went out with WDFW for some sampling.

I volunteered for one day, having no clue what I was getting into. All I knew is that I needed chest waders, which in January usually spells some sort of trouble. So I showed up at the hotel the researchers were staying at with my waders, boots, lunch and a whole bunch of extra clothes.

We rolled out to the hatchery near the mouth of the Elwha and talked with some of the workers there and were out in the field within a half hour. NOAA has been monthly visiting the site collecting baseline data for their reference and treatment sites. The treatment sites will have salmon carcasses placed in them starting next week, data collection for the MDN will start after that.

A little bit of an update on the river after the December storms…it did some damage. The bluffs on the west side of the river were cut back pretty far, in one spot it is about 25 ft (as best we can tell) from a house on top of the bluff. The research crew had placed rebar in the side channels to tack the salmon carcasses to, but the river buried, moved, or plucked out the pieces of rebar so we pounded more into place.

In terms of research work there were to side channels we worked in, each with a reference and treatment reach of the stream. At each site we collected fish to take blood and tissue samples (the fish gurus worked on that) and I helped on the habitat information including sampling benthic invertebrates (clean off rocks and scrape the bottom of the stream to collect bugs in a net), capture terrestrial invertebrates (dance around along the stream banks with a net…one of the hatchery workers asked that no photos be taken while he does it because he looks like he is a little girl running through the tulips). This actually takes a lot of coordination because you have to keep the net moving so you don’t let bugs fly out, but you also have to stay on your feet while walking through the stream, which you can’t see the bottom of.

We collected rock samples for analysis as well as recorded flow characteristics including channel width, depth and velocity. That was fun because that is more my gig, got to use the laser range finder (thank you USFS for introducing me to that over the summer) as well as a flow meter which I haven’t even seen since freshman year at Green River in geology. We used a densitometer to calculate canopy coverage. A weird simple little convex mirror with a grid on it…look at it correctly and wherever you see canopy on an intersection counts towards canopy cover.

One of the jobs that I didn’t work on was shock fishing…one of the guys wore a proton-pack looking thing that had a rod that went into the water. The rod shocks the fish and another guy picks them up with a net.

The NOAA scientists were very nice and very willing to share their knowledge, no question went unanswered and they were a very efficient crew.

A swell start to winter 1/4

Well it has been a really long time since I have posted a blog…a lot has happened since January.

We finally got to go out in the field and do some snow sampling. The crew was trained by a few fellows from the NRCS in how to setup and sample a snow course. The field day was pretty fun; we got to test out our new field equipment, play/work in a few different types of snow, and best of all take in a nice cool day in the mountains. In all we sampled two sites, as the third on our day’s itinerary had not snow, but we scouted it to setup the next snow course.

Sampling will be on a weekly rotation with samplings days on Tuesday and Friday. Each day we will sample three of our six sample sites, with the possible of an additional site on Mt. Zion pending decision from the folks at Battelle who are developing the model and using our data.

Over break, each group member worked on a piece of our sampling methodology and project protocol to build one document. My portion of the project included sampling procedure, data recording, and sample site characteristics.

With the start of the new quarter, we were going to start our regular sampling routine yesterday (January 8), but it was cancelled because of a snow and avalanche advisory for the area. So instead of field work, I got to help set up the GIS lab. We finished installing software on the computers and handheld GPS units as well as program the GPS units for field use. We even got some decorating done in the lab. We hope to go out this Friday, the 11^th to actually conduct some sampling (pending weather as usual).

Work on the sediment project is getting moving also. Because of my schedule w/ work and other projects I have not been able to do much sediment sampling with the crew since November. However, I have been putting in some time with our resident geologist, Dave Parks to work on our sampling protocol. The project is kind of frustrating because one of our main players is not available for communication and we are having to solve problems on our own…it’s not such a big deal except that we don’t know if the answer are what will be needed in the end, but it will work for our component of the project.

Pending a few more questions being answered, I can start the digital photo analysis and finally crank out some data. I am anxious to get some data moving because we will be presenting it at a few conventions, one is Pacific Estuarine Research Society (PERS) in Newport, OR Feb 28 - March 1 the other is American Fisheries Society (AFS) in Bellingham, WA Mar 4-6. I am hoping to present a poster, and may do both, but that is kind if up on the air right now…I can’t decide.