It's not easy for getting around but last year was pretty dry and we didn't have much of a snowpack. |
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He also did several compression tests, which evaluate weak layers in the snowpack that might be prone to being triggered by a skier. |
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In these slides, a broad area of snowpack breaks away and begins moving downhill as a cohesive mass riding over an ice sheet or bare ground. |
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An avalanche forecaster ferrets out a dangerous weakness in the snowpack with the shovel shear test. |
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Will the rains increase and saturate the existing snowpack, or will the magical transformation to snow begin? |
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Each avalanche season has its own unique meteorological history and risk profile, as weather and temperature build layers in the snowpack. |
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The next day, the bright Arizona sunshine was back in action, melting the snowpack in the Huachuca Mountains. |
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The surface is mushy in places, icy and unyielding in others, and higher up there are rock chutes and faces protruding through the snowpack. |
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Yet abundant snowfall and a reliable snowpack are just about guaranteed in Callaghan Country. |
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He discovered that the shape of snow crystals, which forecasters rely on to make their hazard assessments, is not the best indicator of the strength of the snowpack. |
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Already the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, the main water storage for the Delta, is shrinking. |
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The measure follows four years of severe drought and its lowest ever recorded winter snowpack. |
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I was recently at a conference in Canmore with all the specialists and scientists who measure water and snowpack in glaciers. |
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What I thought was ironic was that in some cases there would be data for the summer for snowpack but not for the winter. |
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They act like a giant sponge, absorbing snowpack and the rainfall that falls in thunderstorms and releasing the moisture slowly over time. |
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The flood was the result of a heavy snowpack, spring runoff and precipitation. |
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April and May were cooler than normal, as a result, high elevation snowpack did not melt until late May. |
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So far, this year's snowpack is below last year's level in many parts of the watershed. |
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Helicopters are used to access remote areas to measure the snowpack for comparison with satellite data. |
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Avalanches are the result of complex interactions between weather influences, the existing snowpack, terrain and people. |
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The magnitude of the flooding reflects, in part, the thickness and density of the snowpack and the rate of melting. |
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He digs snow pits to look for weak layers in the snowpack, and cuts sections of the slope with his skis to see if he can dislodge unstable pockets. |
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Given the poor snowpack, that seemed like a good plan, so I decided to stop feeling responsible for people in the mountains and just enjoy the scenery. |
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In mid-December, 150 people made their way to the retreat center up the steep mountain road from the plains below, driving gingerly over the snowpack and ice. |
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The location of algae within the snow can change dramatically during summer days when warm temperatures and intense sun can melt the snowpack by 10 cm or more each day. |
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Spring came and the snowpack melted like an ice cube on hot asphalt, instead of compacting and forming the vast fields of perfect-corn snow we expected. |
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At first light, when alpenglow fires the high summits with radiance like the burn of a gigantic campfire, the dusty surface of the old snowpack glows with eerie luster. |
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The storage of heavy winter precipitation as snowpack is one example. |
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For example, regarding the snowpack for much of the prairie, if you look at historical data, it's there, it's regular, it's always there, and it's a great database. |
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When I look at cadmium and at surface water in comparison to the snowpack, the Athabasca River 2 and the Muskeg River 2 sites seem to have very high amounts of cadmium in relation to the snowpack. |
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Without a snowpack that is 24 per cent higher than normal this year, water managers forecast that reservoirs for the valley's water utilities likely won't fill again this year. |
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Glaciers are broken into zones based on surface snowpack and melt conditions. |
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The next slide is changes in winter snowpack in northern Alberta. |
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What we don't know is how much of that will run off with the snowpack into the river or its tributaries during spring melt, and that's something we plan to try to do next year. |
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After new measurements of the Sierra snowpack, the figure increased this week to 35 percent. |
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In the mountains the snowpack thins, meltwater now brown reluctant drops. |
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The problem can be traced to shortages of rain and snowpack, which lead to shallower rivers and reservoirs, which result in less pressure to speed the water along. |
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At each of these sites, the same sites as shown in our earliest slide, we took a sample of the total snowpack, melted it down, and then filtered 900 millilitres of each snowpack. |
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As you can see here, what's in red shows changes in the number of days per year in which there's snow on the ground and changes in the absolute depth of snowpack at its maximum. |
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These chemicals then drop out of the air over the colder regions of the earth, such as mountain-top snowpack, the Arctic and Antarctic, and glaciers. |
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Again, it indicates that there is some mercury coming from upstream, but a big contribution is from the mining to the airborne mercury loads to the snowpack. |
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We live in the rain shadow of the Rockies here in Alberta, and ultimately a lot of our water supply comes from snowpack in the spring, and we rely upon a lot of that. |
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I haven't included many of the details, but I created some models that predicted river flow and water yield, based solely on climate variables, things like temperature, snowpack, evaporation. |
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What I've presented for the most part has been descriptive, what has happened in flow, what has happened in things such as precipitation, snowpack, and temperatures. |
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Instead of immediately infiltrating the soil or running off into stream channels as rainfall does, this water is first stored in the snowpack for several months. |
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Rain in the winter can have serious impacts when it falls on an existing snowpack or on frozen ground, as the increased runoff can lead to flooding. |
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The issue for me keeps coming back to the headwaters and what's happening in the mountains, where the water emanates from, with global warming, the shrinking glacier snowpack. |
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The general trend, again, is that the majority of places have shown, since 1970, a significant decline in the length of time during the winter in which snow is on the ground and the total depth of the snowpack. |
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Because of the unusually low winter snowpack, almost every campground in the Willamette National Forest will be open for Memorial Day weekend, forest officials have announced. |
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While major flooding is not expected, experts say there is a moderate risk of flooding in the southern Great Lakes region because of above-average snowpack. |
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The ice of a polar glacier is always below the freezing point from the surface to its base, although the surface snowpack may experience seasonal melting. |
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