Early winter

Stage = 47.5cm

First snow survey of the winter season today. About 30-50cm of snowpack around the gauging station in the lower elevations. The students carried out the snow survey while I checked on all the lysimeter drains and data loggers. Before the snow accumulates it is usual for the drains to become blocked by needles from the trees. Therefore, it is important to dig out the snow over each drain, clean it out, and then return the snow over the top. At the mature cedar site, all 3 drains were blocked and the lysimeter trays were filled with freezing water (runoff data lost up to December 28). Nothing like dipping your hand into that freezing water to clean out the drains!

Lysimeter at the young cedar site

Winter preparation

Snow lysimeter at the larch site

Today we did the last of the winter preparation by completing the cleaning and checking of the snow lysimeters at Takiya River. There are three snow lysimeters (larch site shown above, mature cedar site, and young cedar site) that monitor the runoff below the snowpack throughout the winter and spring seasons. At each site three large plastic trays collect the runoff and feed it through pipes to a large tipping bucket device (capacity 200mL and 500mL). In short, we are measuring the snowmelt and rain-on-snow runoff, and comparing between the three sites. This experiment has been running for 10 years now! So we can also look at the long-term trends and patterns.



Cleaning finished