Tom Painter strapped $85,000 worth of scientific equipment to his back and scrambled up the steep,

smooth face of Pothole Dome in California's Yosemite National Park. Ravens squawked overhead, and the
muffled voices of tourists murmured from the easier route up the 250-foot-high (76 meters) granite dome.
"We're taking the sporting route," said Painter, as he jogged up the pinkish rock. Tan and fit, Painter wasn't slowed
by the thin air at 2,650 meters or by his 18-kilogram load.
"My two sons like to slide down parts of these granite domes," Painter said. "It rips their pants to shreds."
Painter is a snow scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and he had come to
Yosemite in late July to make some measurements that will help him and colleagues better measure the amount of
snow that collects there in the winter.
"The work is going to revolutionize our understanding of mountain hydrology," said Frank Gehrke, who arrived a few
minutes later at the top of Pothole Dome.
"It's going to dramatically improve our ability to manage our water supply by boosting our ability to measure and
forecast the amount of water available in the snowpack," said Gehrke, who serves as the chief of snow surveys for
California's Department of Water Resources in Sacramento.
That's important because 75 to 80 percent of the state's water comes from the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada.
That's water that serves tens of millions of people, grows about half of the fruits and nuts in the United States,
produces hydropower, drives industry, supports recreation, and nourishes wildlife. And California is currently in the
midst of the worst drought in state history.
"Regardless of what happens with climate change, even in a good year we don't have enough water," Gehrke said.
The Science of Snowmelt
Near the dome's summit, Painter unpacked his gear. He took a reading with a high-accuracy, $12,000 GPS device.
Then he calibrated his handheld spectrometer by beaming it at a piece of white Teflon, which has a reflectivity of
nearly 100 percent.
Next, Painter walked in a straight line over the granite, for about the length of a football field. As he did so, he
trained the spectrometer across the ground.
The device measures how much radiation is reflected by a surface, both in the visible spectrum of light and in the
invisible infrared spectrum. That's important, because "to us, a surface might look highly reflective, but it may not
actually be so across the whole range of the spectrum," Gehrke said.
To demonstrate how it works, Painter trained his beam on a blue shirt. The curve on his laptop's screen registered in
the wavelength that human eyes perceive as the color blue. He aimed the plastic "gun" at green pants, and the
curve shifted slightly to that color range.
"That's the same range we see for green vegetation," Painter said. "Different surfaces all reflect the sun's rays
differently."
When it comes to snow, the amount of radiation reflected by a sample is a good indicator of how fast the material is
going to melt, Painter said. That's because 90 to 95 percent of the energy that melts snow comes from solar
radiation.
"People think it's the temperature that causes snow to melt, but it's not," Painter said. "Almost nothing would happen
to a pile of snow if you suddenly raised the temperature to 32 degrees Celsius."

Fresher snow tends to have smaller crystals, which reflect more of the sun's energy. Therefore, they stay cooler
longer and melt slower.
But as snow ages, the crystals tend to expand. At that point, they absorb more energy and melt faster. That process
is speeded up even further by dust and black carbon residue from natural and man-made sources, such as plowing
and smokestacks, settling over the snow's surface. Such impurities decrease the reflectance and increase
absorption of energy.
In a feedback loop, the faster the snowpack melts, the more farmers and others have to pump groundwater from the
valleys below. That, in turn, lowers the water table and dries out the overlying soil. That creates more dust, which
then blows up onto the snow, causing it to melt even faster.
Aerial Measurements
Standing on the granite dome in warm, sunny weather, it is hard to imagine snow and ice. But the reason Painter
and Gehrke began summer spectrometer tests this season is to improve the accuracy of measurements they will
make when the area is covered with eight feet (two and a half meters) of powder. They want to see how reflective
the terrain in Yosemite is without snow so they can better compare it to winter readings.
In 2012, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Department of Water Resources launched
the Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO). In winter, fixed-wing aircraft fly over the California mountains, equipped with
a spectrometer, to measure reflectance, and LIDAR, to measure snow depth. LIDAR emits a laser and then
observes how the beam is reflected, in a way similar to radar and sonar.
Reflectance and snow depth help Gehrke forecast how much water is going to run off the snowpack over the
ensuing days, weeks, or months. He combines that information with data from a series of electronic pressure
sensors that have been placed in the mountains, which indicate snow depth at their specific locations. He also
consults tests that have been done continuously for decades, in which scientists or rangers walk predetermined
transects and take core samples of the snow, to measure how much is there and how much water it contains.
The ASO program has vastly expanded the amount of data available on the California snowpack, from just a few
select locations to whole mountaintops, Gehrke said. It has also provided much faster results. In less than a day
from a surveillance flight, JPL technicians can have the one terabyte or so of data analyzed and sent to Gehrke's
office.
Anne Nolin, a geosciences professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says the ASO program uses a
"powerful combination" of technologies that is "very exciting and the first of its kind." The methods should work well
in other snow-covered watersheds, "where we just don't have the information that we need for monitoring snow,"
says Nolin, who was not involved with the team's work but who also studies snowpacks through remote sensing.
Nolin adds that one limitation of the ASO approach is that the aerial surveillance cannot measure snow under tree
cover, which may skew the results. And the process requires local flights, because satellites don't yet have LIDAR
with enough resolution.
Optimizing a Critical Water Supply
Painter said Yosemite is a good place to measure snowpack because the national park has highly varied terrain.
Mapping the reflectance of all those surfaces will therefore improve the resolution of water system models. It doesn't
hurt that working there allows him to follow in the footsteps of John Muir, America's most famous and influential
naturalist and conservationist, he noted.
Yosemite's Tuolumne River Basin is also important because it provides water to the San Francisco Bay area, the
Central Valley, and even Los Angeles through a long system of reservoirs and conveyances.

Like much of the state, the Yosemite area gets most of its precipitation for the year during the winter and early
spring months. When that moisture falls as rain, it tends to run off the land quickly, and much of it ends up in the
ocean. But when it falls as snow, it tends to stick to the mountains. It then melts slowly, so the water becomes
available gradually and can recharge reservoirs and groundwater aquifers.
The past few years have seen shrinking snowpacks in Yosemite, as in most of the Sierra. "We kept thinking
something was wrong with our equipment, but then we went and checked and saw that the numbers were right,"
Painter said of last winter's measurements, which were some of the lowest on record. In February, the Sierra
snowpack was 14 percent of what's considered normal.
The drought is also readily apparent by the scent of a wildfire in the southeastern part of the park and in the charred
remains of last year's Rim fire, which was the largest in recorded history in the Sierra.
As it stands, California can store only enough water in reservoirs to cover the state's needs for about a year and a
half. The nearby Colorado River Basin, in contrast, can store water that will last for up to four and a half years,
thanks to the massive Mead and Powell reservoirs.
All this means Gehrke's monthly and, increasingly, daily forecasts of water available from the Sierra snowpack are
highly valued by city officials, farmers, hydropower producers, and flood-control managers. When they know how
much water will be coming down from the mountains, city officials can order rationing and dam operators can decide
how much water to release downstream.
Those users shouldn't expect to get any more surface water from the mountains this year, Gehrke said. They'll have
to rely on reservoirs, which are currently only half full across the state, and groundwater, which is getting
increasingly tapped.
Mitigating Climate Change
As much of the western U.S. gets even hotter and drier in the coming years, thanks to climate change, spectrometry
studies will help scientists better measure the water that is left, Gehrke said.
The data will also help scientists refine and test climate models. Such models have proved not to be very accurate
in predicting the amount of water in mountain systems because they are so complex, Gehrke said. But that could
change soon.
"The main icon of climate change is melting glaciers, and understanding the snowpack is key to understanding both
our frozen world and our shrinking water supply," Painter said.
Snow science may also help governments lessen climate change itself. Over the past few years, scientists have
suggested that reducing the amount of dust and pollution that falls on snow could not only slow snowmelt, but also
cool the climate. That's because snow reflects the sun's heat back toward space while bare ground tends to absorb
it.
"Our work will determine to what extent that's true," Painter said. "If it does work, it could provide a regional solution
to help fight global warming, as opposed to dealing with the atmosphere directly, which is a global problem."
Earlier, Painter and Gehrke walked through a meadow to check on a snow observation station in a remote part of
northern Yosemite. There had been a rare summer rain recently, so the ground was covered with wildflowers. It
wasn't nearly enough moisture to alleviate the drought, but it was enough for the colorful blossoms to inspire a
sense of hope.
Gehrke stood on the flexible metal "snow pillow," which undulated like a stainless steel waterbed. When flakes pile
up on the metal surface, sensors underneath measure their weight. Gehrke then donned a helmet and harness and

climbed up a tower about two stories tall. He checked the instruments that measure temperature, pressure,
humidity, and wind speed and direction, and he installed a radio transmitter to improve data sharing.
On the way down the tower, Gehrke skinned his shin. A trickle of blood ran down to his sock. But he waved it off,
saying it happens all the time.
After the snows fall, Gehrke will board a refurbished Twin Otter plane and fly back and forth over Yosemite's granite
peaks, the same craggy features scaled by John Muir and photographed by Ansel Adams. Painter and colleagues
will then analyze the data on the size and reflectivity of the snowpack, and that will inform Gehrke's reports on how
much water Californians can expect to receive.
"Understanding the Sierra snowpack is critical to California's future," Painter said as he took in the spectacular view.
"I hope my children and their children will be able to rely on the snow, too."