Project Grant NA04NES4400002

The Bureau of Reclamation awarded a $1,084,428 Cooperative Agreement to the Regents of the University of Colorado under the Snow Water Supply Forecasting program (CFDA 15.078) to develop a Surface Snow Water Equivalent Data Fusion System (SWE-Fusion) for the western United States. The primary objective is to provide improved surface snow water equivalent estimates to enable better decision-making during anomalous hydrologic conditions like drought and flooding. The University will combine...

The National Science Foundation awarded a $275,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project Grant to Applied Research Team Inc. of Denver, Colorado under the NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program (CFDA 47.084). The grant will support the development of machine learning algorithms to improve snowpack depth and water content retrieval from C-band and X-band radar data. Accurate snowpack information is critical for water management in the Western U.S., but current retrieval...

This $304,752 National Science Foundation Division of Polar Programs award will fund research to improve climate model simulations of sea ice physics and feedbacks through analysis of observations from the Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate field campaign. The University of Washington will integrate spatially and temporally coordinated field observations with single column and global climate modeling to develop parameterizations that more accurately...

This cooperative agreement award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will fund the development of global, high-resolution snowpack property datasets and analysis products at the University of Maryland, College Park from August 2021 to July 2023. The $205,000 award supports creating the first multi-decadal, 4-km resolution daily snow cover area, snow water equivalent, and snow depth dataset and analysis system under NOAA's Weather and Air Quality Research program (CFDA...

This Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation, under the Snow Water Supply Forecasting Program (CFDA 15.078), will develop an advanced snow estimation product using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model. The $1,270,676.70 project, with an award date of January 30, 2025 and a completion date of December 31, 2027, will leverage near-daily CubeSat data, ground observations, and LiDAR snow maps to enhance a process-based distributed hydrologic...

The U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation awarded a $623,849.55 Cooperative Agreement grant to Hydroinnova LLC on February 9, 2024 under the Snow Water Supply Forecasting Program (CFDA 15.078). The 2.5-year project aims to demonstrate and deploy two novel methods for measuring snow water equivalent, a critical parameter for improving water supply forecasts in drought-prone regions of the western U.S. Specifically, Hydroinnova will develop, test, and validate a cosmic ray muon...

This Cooperative Agreement award from the Bureau of Reclamation under the Snow Water Supply Forecasting Program (CFDA 15.078) will address key knowledge gaps in understanding the impacts of wildfire on snow accumulation, ablation, and runoff generation. The $876,296.41 project, with a period of performance from January 4, 2024 to September 30, 2026, will leverage a network of automated stations and field studies initiated following the 2020 Cameron Peak and East Troublesome Fires in Colorado....

The Bureau of Reclamation awarded a $1,078,490.19 Cooperative Agreement to the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Northern Water) under the Snow Water Supply Forecasting program (CFDA 15.078) to conduct airborne snow surveys over the Colorado River headwaters. Over the next 3 years, Northern Water will partner with Airborne Snow Observatories, Inc. to perform 3 airborne snow surveys per year during the spring runoff period. The data collected from these surveys, along with ISNOBAL...

This $400,000 National Science Foundation award under the Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050) will fund research at The Ohio State University to advance understanding and forecasting of blowing snow hazards in the Northern Great Plains. Through March 2026, the project will investigate the microphysical structure and evolution of blowing snow layers using innovative ground-based and balloon-borne instrumentation. Traditional and lidar observations will be used to evaluate and improve a fully...

The University of Arizona, through a $996,526.93 Cooperative Agreement award from the Bureau of Reclamation under the Snow Water Supply Forecasting Program (CFDA 15.078), will use a 40-year snowpack dataset and newly developed regression modeling and machine learning techniques to enhance water supply forecasts across the Colorado River Basin. Specifically, the project will incorporate improved snowpack data and model optimizations into the National Resources Conservation Networks'...