In a truly collaborative effort, a large remote sensing and field campaign is scheduled for the Spring 1996 snowmelt season at the Niwot Ridge/ Green Lakes Valley LTER site and at nearby Loch Vale Watershed in Rocky Mountain National Park. The objective of the campaign is to provide a comprehensive regional dataset for ongoing research concerning the responses of alpine hydrology and ecology to changing snowpacks. The effort includes contributions from: the NASA AVIRIS Program, the NASA EOS IDS project Hydrology, Hydrochemical Modeling and Remote Sensing in Seasonally Snow-Covered Alpine Drainage Basins", NOAA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Analytical Surveys, Inc. (ASI; a commercial photogrammetric surveying and mapping firm located in Colorado Springs, CO), the National Biological Survey (NBS), the National Park Service (NPS), and the USGS Water Resources Division.
The remote sensing acquisitions will include a three flight AVIRIS, Thematic Mapper Simulator (TMS), and high-altitude CIR photography time series of the region in April, May, and June (provided at no cost by NASA), three Landsat TM scenes (provided by NSIDC), and a time series of five to six low-altitude black and white aerial photography (provided by the EOS IDS project). ASI is donating their services to produce a high resolution (10 m) digital elevation model of the Niwot site (NWT), which will be used in subsequent analysis and modeling using the remote sensing data.
The remote sensing data coverage will include the entire alpine region of the Colorado Front Range, including Rocky Mountain National Park. Field surveys supporting the remote sensing data acquisitions will be performed at the Niwot site by NWT, NASA, and EOS personnel, and at the Loch Vale site by NBS, NPS, and USGS personnel. The contributed remote sensing and DEM data alone is valued at ~$125,000.
Immediate uses of the campaign data will include snow water equivalence and snowmelt modeling, and further development of algorithms to retrieve snow surface information from remotely sensed imagery. The snowmelt information will in turn be used as inputs for research on geochemical and biogeochemical controls on the solute content of surface waters. Other potential uses of the data include examination of vegetation/snowpack dynamics and vegetation biomass studies.
For more information: Don Cline, dCline@LTERnet.edu
