NASA SnowEx is a five-year program aimed at filling important knowledge, technical, and data gaps for snow remote sensing. To date there have been two major campaigns: SnowEx 2017 and SnowEx 2020, both involving extensive field measurements and airborne data acquisitions.

 

SnowEx 2017 was located in western Colorado on Grand Mesa and Senator Beck Basin over a 3-week period in February. SnowEx 2020 had multiple sites in across the western US where researchers made weekly field measurements coordinated with radar and lidar overflights. 

 

Nolin and her team made repeated measurements at Sagehen Creek Field Station, California. From December through March they dug snowpits in forested and open sites and analyzed them for stratigraphy, temperature, density, liquid water content and grain size; they measured snow depth and SWE along a forest density gradient. All SnowEx data are available through the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).