Marianne Cowherd

Snow is a virtual reservoir that stores water during the winter and releases it at the beginning of the agricultural growing season. The structure of forests in the places where snow falls has a large impact on what happens to snow -- does it sublimate to the atmosphere, get taken up by surrounding vegetation, infiltrate into the soil, or melt and run downstream to cities and agricultural regions in the spring? Large wildfires alter forest structure in the high mountains where snow falls.

However, we do not fundamentally understand how changes to forest structure alter snow depth, density, and melt timing. Vegetation, topography, and climate have entangled impacts on energy and mass balances, and existing prediction models of forest-snow dynamics cannot be generalized to include the impacts of disturbance. While satellite observations can complement models and ground measurements, they create additional challenges in data storage and efficient analysis, which require computational advances to address.

In my work, I use remote sensing observations, computational modeling, and field data to understand spatial and temporal patterns in snow depth and density in the context of wildfire disturbance.