Peter Gadomski, of the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, and Jeffery Deems, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the University of Colorado, Boulder, used a RIEGL VZ-4000 TLS in February 2017 to support the NASA SnowEx campaign (https://snow.nasa.gov/snowex).

The VZ-4000 was used to measure snow depths in the Senator Beck basin in southwestern Colorado, collecting data in areas that are unsafe to sample directly due to avalanche hazard. Two other teams collected TLS data at Grand Mesa, Colorado.

This TLS data will be integrated with data from a suite of other instruments, including airborne LiDAR, radar, microwave, and imaging spectrometry, as well as ground-based instruments and direct snow measurements. The goal of SnowEx is to characterize the amount of water stored in Earth’s terrestrial snow-covered regions.

LiDAR data (intensity greyscale) of the Swamp Angel study plot in the Senator Beck basin in Colorado, maintained by the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies (http://www.snowstudies.org/).

For more information, please contact Peter Gadomski:  peter.j.gadomski@erdc.dren.mil