{"id":177,"date":"2016-03-04T23:30:14","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T23:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/?p=177"},"modified":"2020-07-14T20:47:13","modified_gmt":"2020-07-14T20:47:13","slug":"shifting-snows-on-niwot-ridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/shifting-snows-on-niwot-ridge\/","title":{"rendered":"Shifting snows on Niwot Ridge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just set up my first time-lapse camera on Niwot Ridge, Colorado, with CU-undergraduate Gage Hamel.<\/p>\n<p>What do we hope to capture? Fallen snow shifts like sand, and sets like cement. It forms regular features, which range from dart-like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/snow-bedforms-on-frozen-lakes\/\">crescents<\/a>\u00a0to ripples, waves, and elongate sastrugi. These snow features\u00a0affect\u00a0the reflectivity and aerodynamic roughness of the snow, which in turn determine its temperature and melt rate.<\/p>\n<p>My aim is to measure and quantitatively predict the way these features form and change in time. The first stop is to get detailed observations of a changing snow surface. The field site is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colorado.edu\/mrs\/home\">Niwot Ridge<\/a>,\u00a0where the University of Colorado keeps a weather station and the wind carves deep sastrugi.<\/p>\n<p>Below are two time-lapse videos of snow on the ridge (<em>photos:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/hydrosciences.colorado.edu\/people\/person_details.php?person_ID=82\">Sarah Evans<\/a><\/em>). These are examples of the textures and changes we hope to quantify.<\/p>\n<p>This gif\u00a0shows waves of powdered snow chasing downwind across the landscape:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/makeagif.com\/bGpdYW\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-180\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-180 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Snow_waves_move_across_Niwot_Ridge_Colorado.gif\" alt=\"Snow_waves_move_across_Niwot_Ridge_Colorado\" width=\"960\" height=\"720\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In this four-day timelapse\u00a0the snow edges are worn back by the wind (coming from the left). Then they set, and remain almost motionless until a new storm erases them at the start of February.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Shifting_snow_on_Niwot_Ridge_Colorado.gif\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-178\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-178 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Shifting_snow_on_Niwot_Ridge_Colorado.gif\" alt=\"Shifting_snow_on_Niwot_Ridge_Colorado\" width=\"960\" height=\"720\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>These videos show us that snow features move. I&#8217;m looking for\u00a0<em>how<\/em>. My camera will take photos every few seconds. That should be enough to see perturbations grow and move over the waves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just set up my first time-lapse camera on Niwot&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":181,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,54,83,4],"tags":[30,50,49,26,48],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fieldwork","category-niwot","category-polar-climate","category-research","tag-colorado","tag-nederland","tag-sastrugi","tag-snow","tag-timelapse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kochanski.org\/kelly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}