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HOSTED RESEARCH
PROGRAMS/PROJECTS
 Dr. Jason Neff (on right, holding coring tool),
and his collaborator Ashley Ballantyne, were assisted by
the CSAS in locating this alpine tarn near the Senator
Beck Basin Study Area where they collected a very
exciting core sample containing a 5,000+ year record of
lake sediment deposition.
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 Dr.
Tom Painter, now at the University of Utah but
originally at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at
the University of Colorado, was the CSAS's very first
and remains the longest tenured hosted researcher
utilizing the Senator Beck Basin Study Area at Red
Mountain Pass. Tom and the CSAS were jointly funded by
the National Science Foundation to conduct a multi-year
investigation of the radiative effects of desert dusts
deposited on alpine snowpacks, a project that has
yielded very significant new insights into processes
driving snowmelt in the mountains. The 'dust-on-snow'
theme has also resulted in a number of additional
research projects that beautifully illustrate the
synergistic potential of interdisciplinary snow system
science, as noted below. Most recently, Tom and his
graduate students are focusing their work on the remote
sensing of snowcover albedo, as influenced by
dust-on-snow, and using Senator Beck Basin as a
calibration and verification site, with CSAS field
monitoring and sampling support. See also our
News page for details
about how the results of Tom's research has begun to be
applied by water managers throughout Colorado, through
our collaborative Colorado Dust-on-Snow (CODOS) program
with Tom and our partner Andrew Barrett, at National
Snow and Ice Data Center.
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 Since
the winter of 2006/2007 the CSAS has been hosting
researcher
Hans-Peter
Marshall's NASA-funded, three-year ‘FMCW' (snow
penetrating) radar research investigating snowpack
structure and SWE in the Senator Beck Basin Study Area.
HP, formerly at INSTAAR at the University of Colorado,
is now an Assistant Professor at Boise State University
at the Center for Geophysical Investigation of the
Shallow Subsurface in the Department of Geosciences. He
and his field assistant Andy Gleason are seen here
pulling the side-looking configuration of the radar
through the CSAS's Swamp Angel Study Plot in one of a
time-series of measurements. The
CSAS has recently installed a new 250 watt photovoltaic
array for HP to enable him to run an 'up-looking' FMCW
radar system from underneath the snowpack at Swamp Angel
Study Plot throughout the winter and spring of
2008/2009.
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CSAS is hosting and facilitating the Terrestrial
Biogeochemistry Laboratory from the University of
Colorado’s Department of Geosciences in a variety of
projects which complement the dust-on-snow research
being conducted by the CSAS, in collaboration with Dr.
Tom Painter, expanding the scope of this ‘mountain
system science’ research theme:
PhD student Corey Lawrence’s dissertation goals
are, “to (1) quantify the contemporary rate of [upwind
arid land] dust deposition in the San Juan Mountains,
(2) determine the fate of the this material once it is
deposited, and (3) estimate the importance of this dust
to soil and surface water biogeochemistry.” Corey is
seen here installing a soil lysimeter to capture
snowmelt water at the Senator Beck Basin Study Plot.
The CSAS has
collected snow and water samples for the past three
years, and operated an active dust collection system for
the winter of 2007/2008. Corey hopes to complete and
defend his dissertation in 2009.
 Dr.
Heidi Steltzer, of the Natural Resource Ecology
Laboratory at Colorado State University, has added the
Senator Beck Basin Study Area at Red Mountain Pass to
her many venues for ongoing studies of plants in arctic
and alpine environments. Most recently, the CSAS
supported her 2008 pilot study investigating how
advances in the date of snowmelt might effect alpine
ecology. Besides being a very active user of the
Senator Beck Basin Study Area, as an ecologist, Heidi
also serves on the CSAS board of directors and brings a
very important perspective to our efforts to facilitate
interdisciplinary, snow system research and long-term
monitoring. Heidi
is seen here at her Senator Beck Basin field site in
June, 2008 working with her Mountain Studies Institute
intern Justin Anderson, an undergraduate ecology student
from the University of Kansas.
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PROJECTS |
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