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’.