色花堂app

色花堂appers in 色花堂app鈥檚 geosciences department are working on a virtual watershed project to make better, easy-to-use computer models of Idaho鈥檚 and the West鈥檚 snowpack to help water users plan better.

鈥淚magine that scientists get to play with this virtual watershed and they can see what happens if there is a 90-percent snowpack and it all melts in a few days and they can see what the outcomes and consequences are of that,鈥� said Donna Delparte, ISU assistant geosciences researcher, who is ISU鈥檚 lead on the project. 鈥淪cientists will have the ability to start playing out different scenarios in this virtual watershed.鈥�

At ISU, Delparte is working with geosciences Assistant Professors Sarah Godsey and Shannon Kobs Nawotniak. The ISU researchers are in turn working with collaborators at University of Idaho, Boise State University and at universities in Nevada and New Mexico, and Danny Marks at the U.S. Agricultural 色花堂app Office in Boise.

These multi-state collaborators are in the second year of a three-year, $6 million project called the Western Consortium for Watershed Analysis, Visualization and Exploration (WC-WAVE), a National Science Foundation project funded through the EPSCoR program.

鈥淲e are building a computational model that will ideally be able to be used at other places in Idaho and the U.S. to understand how snow is falling and is redistributed and recharging the watershed,鈥� said Nawotniak.

Nawotniak is an expert on volcanoes and the distribution of ash. She is working with Godsey, a hydrologist, to transfer Nawotniak鈥檚 knowledge about the distribution of ash by wind, to how wind distributes snow.

鈥淥ne of the things we鈥檙e really looking at is how wind redistributes snow,鈥� Godsey said. 鈥淲e have enough wind that it can really matter on how snow is redistributed and we care about these different pieces of the snowpack model because it influences how much water we have available to us, when it arrives and what kind of vegetation that can be supported throughout the mountains of Idaho.鈥�

鈥淭his type of model,鈥� said Nawotniak, 鈥済ives us the tools to look forward and see worst-case scenarios, and help us do what we need to prepare. It is not a program that will help us predict something like climate change, but if we are impacted by climate change, if things get wetter or dryer, it will help us model those effects.鈥�

Both Nawotniak and Godsey emphasized the visualization of the computational model is an extremely important part of this project, and that is where Delparte鈥檚 expertise comes into play.

鈥淲e want to make this accessible to users across a variety of backgrounds and skill levels to be able to see what their options are, what the output is and to get fast feedback to interact with the model more directly,鈥� Nawotniak said.

There are many potential uses and users of this project.

鈥淚n Idaho, water is king,鈥� Godsey said. 鈥淔rom agricultural users to fishermen, all sorts of people really care about water. A lot of models we have predicting the snowpack and water available are based on the past, but there may be variables outside our experience range that we may want to understand. We might have fire or drought, or what happens if vegetation is gone? That is where the value of a model like ours comes in.鈥�

For more information on the WC-WAVE project, visit idahostateu.com/WC-WAVE.