In the next few months, you might notice a
flurry of activity and an influx of equipment in the Snowy Range, especially if
you aren’t one for sticking to the trails. If you stumble upon a stream with an
equipment draped tower nearby, you may have found one of the watershed research
sites for the Wyoming Center for Environmental Hydrology and Geophysics (WyCEHG).
Though it may look like a jumble of metal and plastic, each piece of equipment
is busy acquiring important data about water to help teams of researchers at
the University of Wyoming better understand water in Wyoming and the West.
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| A water sampler |
WyCEHG was established by a five-year
National Science Foundation grant with the goal of providing water resource
managers, stakeholders, and scientists with cutting-edge knowledge and tools to
improve water management. As the headwater state for many of its neighbors,
Wyoming has to ensure that water allocations are met and that Wyoming
communities still have enough water. To do this, it is essential to have a
complete picture of the natural water system, which is currently not well
understood. WyCEHG brings together researchers from a multitude of fields to
help create this complete picture along with two support facilities: the
Facility for Imaging the Near and Subsurface Environment (FINSE) and the
Surface and Subsurface Hydrology Lab (SSHL). This week we’ll look at SSHL and
the hydrological side of WyCEHG.
“SSHL is not just a location where equipment
is stored,” says Elizabeth Traver, the faculty manager of SSHL. “It’s kind of a
research and training umbrella to help people figure out what instruments they
need and get them out in the field.”
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| A tipping bucket |
Since her start at UW in December, 2012,
Traver has been busy helping researchers prepare for their field work. “I’m
facilitating researchers, whether they’re undergraduate students or professors,
with their research and equipment,” she says. “People are telling me what they
need and I’m purchasing those items so that they’ll be here when they need
them.”
While the bulk of WyCEHG research will happen
during the summer months, some projects are already underway. In addition to
on-going field projects centered on meteorological observations linked to tree
respiration, soil water and the transport of water though our mountain systems
and into streams, two emerging projects focus on snow. Snow is an essential
part of the hydrologic picture in Wyoming where most river and ground water
comes from snowmelt. One project looks at how much water is actually coming
from snow by using a snow equivalency instrument.
“Snow can have a little or a lot
of moisture in it: light, fluffy snow compared to wet, heavy snow,” says
Traver. “So what a snow water equivalency instrument does is it actually tells
you how much water is in the snow that fell, because the water itself is what
is important and not how deep the snow is.”
The other project is about snow isotopes, or
the variants of chemical elements in the snow.
“You can take the isotopes in the snow and
determine the possible origin of that snow based on the isotope relationships,”
Traver says.
By developing a library of isotopes in
rainfall, snow, groundwater and streams, the WyCEHG team will gain a better
understanding of the ultimate fate of our rain and snow and address the
critical questions: does it end up back in the air through evaporation, down in
the ground or glowing through our rivers?
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| A map of the watershed in the Snowy Range Mountains |
An undergraduate student has begun to collect
snow samples from around the Snow Range Ski area, which he will study using
isotope analyzers. While the bulk of winter research is centered on snow
sampling, researchers are also preparing for the spring thaw. The area of focus
for the summer is a small unnamed creek that drains into Libby Creek, which
flows into the Little Laramie River downstream from Laramie.
“There are things that we want set up before
the snow starts to melt because we want to be ready for the most important time
of the year, water-wise,” says Traver. “We will be putting a whole bunch of
instruments on the tower with the ones already out there. We’re just trying to
get as much detail as we can from that one specific area.”
The ultimate goal of studying this one
watershed in so much detail is to create a water model that can be used in
other watersheds.
“The idea is, measure everything, put these
parameters in the model and figure out which processes are most important,”
Traver says. “Then we can go to a different watershed, measure just those
parameters and see if our models will work.”
This type of approach, linking measurements
and models, will ultimately help water resource managers, stakeholders and
scientists understand what happens to every drop of water in the watershed. This
knowledge will help empower them to make scientifically founded decisions about
water use and allocation.
By Kali S. McCrackin
Photos courtesy of WyCEHG
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