David Hill, PhD on citizen science and studying snow

- March 16, 2021 -

David Hill is a professor at Oregon State University and a National Geographic Explorer. No matter the hemisphere, if it is spring time, you’ll find him out on skis sampling the snow between mountain summit and trailhead. For over 25 years, he has studied how water behaves from snowy mountain headwaters to coastal environments. David joins us to talk about how we can use citizen science to study snow.

Post-talk activity

Watch David’s talk:

More resources:

Snow science interactive map:

Check out this map of California and Nevada to learn details about recent snowmelt and more. David’s suggestions:

1. Play around with toggling on the ’swe data.’ You can show actual values, changes, percent of normal, and so on.

2. Play around with National Gridded Data. This is a computer model, at a coarse 1 km scale. With CSO, we try to run models on a 25 meter scale or so.

Engage in your own citizen science:

You can contribute to projects like David’s through sharing your own snow depth data. Check out Mountain Hub to get involved.

Learn more about David’s research:

To read some of David’s published articles and academic work, click here.