There are SNOTELS all over Alaska, but you can’t book a room at any of them. That’s because “SNOTEL” isn’t shorthand for a ski resort. It’s a type of weather monitoring system.
Daniel Fisher manages the small team of researchers that installs SNOTEL stations in Alaska. He’s been working with the snow survey and water supply forecasting program for the past 16 years.
“My background was in watershed science academically, and so had snow classes in college, and [it] was just a better fit for myself professionally, and I was excited to do the work. I love snow. I love winter,” Fisher says.
The federal snow survey program, which is under the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, has been around for nearly 90 years.
“If you think of the Western United States, like Nevada and Utah, they have basins where 95% of the water that flows down the streams comes from snow melt,” Fisher says. “How much snow is in the mountains [is] really important for predicting how much water there’s going to be for towns, as well as for irrigation.”
One way they monitor those levels is through the use of snow telemetry stations, or SNOTELs. Using a combination of strategies, the stations measure annual precipitation, snow height, and temperature.
It may not have a minibar, but each SNOTEL has one thing most hotels have plenty of – a pillow.
Fisher says snow pillows look like “a waterbed out there in the wild.” Snow pillows measure how wet snow is. They’re made out of the same material used for river rafts- and the ones Fisher plans to install throughout Southeast are about as big.
“We fill them with about 170 gallons of fluid, and then as the snow pack exerts pressure down on that pillow, we can figure out what the water content of the snow pack is,” Fisher says.
They may look like a waterbed, but they’re not good for napping.
“Very seldom do we leave them open to the environment, because bears like to chew on them, and so we either protect them with sheet metal or chain link fencing,” Fisher says.
Right now there are four SNOTELs, and one slightly less robust Snow-Lite station, in Southeast Alaska, but over the next few years the plan is to install more in communities like Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan and Yakutat. Fisher says his lean team of four researchers is planning to expand throughout Western Alaska as well.
“When I look at the state and when we look at snow trends, there’s so many places I wish we had data, and we don’t, and we can’t get the data from the 50s, because there’s just no measurements back then,” Fisher says. “But I want to start getting those data points now so that people who come later will have have that data.”
Fisher says the data the SNOTELS collect isn’t only valuable for predicting water supply levels.
“Snow depth data is important for wildlife managers, for animal productivity, the data gets used by avalanche forecasters. There’s been some discussion in Southeast about whether snow levels impact Yellow Cedar decline,” Fisher says.
And he says there’s a fun side too.
“A lot of recreationists use the data for either if they’re out snow machining or or back country skiing, to see what the snow conditions are like.”
Fisher’s office is applying for permits this month to install the SNOTEL stations throughout Southeast and Western Alaska. After they have the green light, the installation process will take some time. After all, there are a few challenges that come with accessing rural areas where the stations will be installed…snow is just one of them.
