During the past year we have brought together a dedicated and growing team of citizen scientists, university and government researchers, and industry partners to collaborate in the collection of…

This federal contract award is a Cooperative Agreement between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center and the University of Washington (UW) to support the "Community Snow Observations" (CSO) project. The award, valued at $1,265,500.67, will enable UW to expand its existing grassroots citizen science community to collect snow observation data that will be used to validate NASA's remote sensing capabilities for measuring snow water equivalence. The project will leverage cloud computing technologies to seamlessly integrate citizen-collected data into regional snow hydrology models, providing valuable feedback to the community. This award does not have a set-aside designation. As a leading research university, UW has extensive experience delivering a wide range of research, healthcare, and technical services under both prime and subcontractor federal contracts and grants with various agencies.

During the past year we have brought together a dedicated and growing team of citizen scientists, university and government researchers, and industry partners to collaborate in the collection of "community snow observations" (CSO). Our accomplishments during the prototype phase include the building of a grassroots citizen science (CS) community, the development of computing technologies to enhance CS engagement, and the incorporation of CS observations into snow hydrology and NASA remote sensing validation datasets. We built the grassroots community on a foundation of existing connections with residents of the city of valdez, alaska. Together with industry partners at mountain hub, we designed innovative approaches to incentivize community participation through "citizen science ambassadors" and "data for good" programs. We used scalable cloud services to pull CS observations from the mountain hub database, and then posted these data in real-time on a web mapping service for public viewing. By assimilating the CS observations into our modeling workflow we have significantly improved snow water equivalence (SWE) estimates for the thompson pass region near valdez. Moving forward, we will expand our efforts to recruit new and retain existing citizen scientists. We will expand a series of incentive programs that will more formally link CS measurements to environmental and socioeconomic causes, and we will reward citizens who make significant contributions. We will also expand our publicity efforts to include broader regions of the pacific northwest and alaska. Building on our existing computational tools, we will design web services that link existing project components so that data can flow seamlessly from the CS smartphone to our labs for assimilation into snow hydrology simulations. We will feed these simulations back to the community so that CS participants can view the impact their work is having on improving regional hydrology simulations and operational remote sensing products. NASA's broad investment in the measurement of snow from airborne and spaceborne platforms will be significantly enhanced by our CS observations. We will continue to assimilate CS data into regional hydrology models in order to validate coarse resolution gravimetry, altimetry, optical and radar remote sensing approaches to tracking SWE. Our project design will emphasize scalability and automation with the goal of providing an infrastructure to support CSO activity after the project ends. We will also archiving our data at national data centers so that CSO data will be accessible by other researchers who can continue to make improvements to NASA's earth science monitoring capabilities.