Blog: Scientists clash over how to track the West’s vital snowpack
A controversial recent study highlights an old truth about the American West’s snowpack: it’s difficult to measure—and just as hard to forecast how much of its water will ultimately reach tens of millions of people and vast swaths of farmland. Water managers have increasingly turned to aircraft that use lasers to gauge the snowpack across entire basins. But the Aug. 15 scientific paper argues for a less expensive strategy: focusing new monitoring efforts on a select number of locations known as “hotspots” that excel at predicting how much water will run off from the snowpack—a frozen reservoir that can change dramatically over short distances.
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