Thank you for coming today.
I will wait till the end
to tell you what these little goodies on the side are,
but I'm Georgia Murray.
I'm a staff scientist for the Appalachian Mountain Club.
I've been with the AMC since 2000.
And this talk is gonna dig deep
into AMC's Snow Monitoring that we've been doing
for decades in the White Mountains.
And I'll also talk about how
the multiple types of data sets,
will enable us to build a better picture of mountain snow,
as well as how they fit into our climate monitoring,
and the overall network that we have
in the White Mountain National Forest.
And of course, this work is done in a team,
that are listed here,
and here are their faces as well,
so you can put a name to a face.
Jordan Tourville, who's attending today,
Maya Shyevitch, who's one of our research interns,
Miriam Ritchie, our research assistant,
and Dr. Sarah Nelson, the director of research.
And this work couldn't happen without other key staff
at the Appalachian Mountain Club,
including seasonal interns, the hut caretakers.
You'll see how they're really involved in this.
Our reservation staff,
who get this data on a daily basis,
and report it online,
so the National Weather Service can utilize the snow data.
And then our many partners,
as well as the National Weather Service
who supported the, some of our monitoring work.
So AMC has been doing a number of different types
of monitoring in the White Mountain National Forest
and snow is one of them.
But it's part of a larger network of monitoring
that we do around plant phenology,
air and water quality,
and climate change indicators in particular.
And so this snow work you will see,
is part of our climate work.
And we also engage citizen science,
in collecting some of this information.
This is a map of the White Mountain National Forest.
The darker green is the wilderness areas within the forest.
There's lots of dots.
And this is kind of a busy map.
Trust me that I'll show a cleaner map,
so that you can see where the snow
monitoring is in particular.
But over here is Lonesome Lake,
is one of our winter monitoring huts.
Here's another, wait, it goes Lonesome,
(laughs) Zealand, and then Carter.
Carter is over in this area right here.
So those are the white.
And then the, the purple squares are also
long-term monitoring sites on the summit of Mount Washington
by the Mount Washington Observatory,
but Pinkham Notch is run by the Appalachian Mountain Club.
And then these other locations are long-term
hobo weather stations, which we'll get into as well.
So, why do we care about snow,
and what's happening with snow
in the mountains in particular?
I borrowed this great graphic
from the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation,
that touches on the many impacts
of the changes we're seeing in snow.
You know, we're seeing cold and snow
an are going away in this area.
And of course that impacts recreation with lower snow packs.
It impacts the water cycle with not only
less coming into snow,
but then it's going out in different,
in different flushes than it's typically doing.
The seasonal patterns are changing with the water cycle,
and of course there's impacts to wildlife
that are adapted to these climates and snow environments.
If there's less snow, there's less camouflage,
for the snowshoe here, for example.
And then there are also forest health impacts,
and expansion of organisms
such as ticks and mosquitoes.
So there's many impacts from both losing cold,
and losing snow, and just the shorter season altogether.
And AMC has had particular interest
in the Alpine areas of the White Mountain National Forest.
This is the presidential range here,
and the different colors are the different
Alpine community types.
And we made this map a number of years ago.
I think Jordan might be revisiting some of this,
but you know, we're really interested in how
changes in snow, and changes in climate,
may be affecting the species here.
And we've been tracking Alpine plant phenology
as one of the ways to look at
how there might be impacts to these species,
and how some species may be adjusting
to the changes with less snow or warmer springs,
and some species may not.
And so we are starting to build
a long-term phenology data set,
and Jordan's put together some of that work
showing some interesting patterns,
particularly with Alpine, that they may not be responsive,
or as responsive as as other species then,
to the spring warming.
So, so what have we been doing
when it comes to snow monitoring in the White Mountains?
We have a long term Pinkham Notch daily snow,
both snow depth and snowfall from 1930.
This picture is from the big snows
that we had in the sixties.
You can see these down there.
So that's been going on.
And that's thanks to Joe Dodge
who was around in the thirties,
and realized he needed local information.
He was getting grade Maine weather service forecast,
et cetera, and realized he needed
on the ground observations.
So he started monitoring at Pinkham Notch,
and also was a co-founder of the Mount Watkin Observatory.
And of course that data set is,
is really essential to understanding mountain climate.
AMC is, also has this three huts that we,
again, I had pointed out earlier on the map,
where we have daily snow on and off since 1990.
So there's, there's some gaps in some of the data sets,
but we're starting to really dive into this.
And then since about 2007 for the lower elevations,
we have hobo temperature loggers,
which we're looking at do they serve as a proxy
for snowmelt timing in particular?
Because that is a particular interest to us,
in relation to plant response to climate change.
So are we seeing snowmelt earlier?
Are the plants responding to that?
And then the last piece is the citizen science,
or community snow observation,
where we get recreators to help us
collect snow depth information.
We've been promoting that since
about 2017 in the northeast,
and really getting some, some great spatial data
that we would not have had.
So it's really adding to our dataset.
And so what is happening?
When we look at the long-term record
for winter temperatures, we are seeing a warming across,
you know, the region New Hampshire is warming at the most,
or had the fastest rate of warming.
Pinkham Notch is on par with that,
or just a little bit under,
but the summit is lagging a little bit behind.
And, and in my analysis for 2000 through 2018,
it was not statistically warming,
but the, the trend was certainly positive,
in the positive direction.
As we're filling out this even further into 2022,
we are seeing it shift.
So the news is, it's still get,
it's still warming, it's getting worse.
We're seeing even the summit
transitioning into warmer winters.
And so here's the actual record of the
total snowfall at Pinkham Notch.
You know, there's some gaps back here
because of our data criteria of what was acceptable.
But when we look at the long-term record,
we're seeing 20.7 centimeters less per decade.
So that's quite a bit of shift in total snowfall.
And then when we look at the timing of the snowmelt,
in the long-term record,
we're also seeing a shift earlier in the season,
1.7 days per decade,
which overall, it's about 14 days, two weeks,
of the snowmelt happening earlier at Pinkham Notch.
And so putting it in a little bit easier terms,
it's about, we're losing about 50%
of the maximum snow depth at Pinkham.
Snowfall's declining by about 25%,
and the snow pack is melting out two weeks earlier.
So what about the other data that,
that we have available to us?
So we just went over, Pinkham?
We have some data from the Highland Center,
although it's spotty back through time.
There's the Tuckerman Ravine, Hermit Lake Shelter data,
and Carter Notch, Zealand Falls Hut, and Lonesome Lake.
And those are the three I mentioned earlier.
And so what does it, what does the data look like?
This is the 2023 snow season.
So what's nice about this,
is you start to see the differences obviously,
with elevation, the two sites that are seeing
the deepest snow,
what would make sense is Tuckerman Ravine
and Carter Notch over 3000 feet,
and then Lonesome and Zealand,
and then Pinkham and Highland.
And then the other piece of this that's really,
you know, gonna inform some of our work,
is that snowmelt timing with elevation.
So you're starting to see
that indeed, snow milk is happening earlier
at these lower elevation sites,
and snow is hanging on at the higher elevation sites.
So one of the questions for us is,
do these mountain sites have,
provide a snow refugia that may be
hanging on to snow later in the season?
And this is Carter Notch,
the caretaker, taking an observation.
But this was before we got the rain.
So, and I mentioned that we have these other instruments
that may help us understand snowmelt timing.
We have these hobo data loggers.
This is an example of one that is in a forested site.
And so it's just a simple temperature logger
that is sitting on the surface.
And what we decided to do was look at co,
fairly co-located, they're a little bit separated,
but the snow stakes,
which are in open canopy versus the hobos,
which tend to be under life canopy,
but they're paired with the phenology plots.
And we're looking at when does the
surface temperature start to fluctuate diurnally?
That would indicate that the snow has melted.
So, and we look at that at Pinkham Notch,
we see a fairly good relationship here.
What's also interesting is just to look at the range
of snowmelt timing.
You know, it spans almost 60 days.
But the relationship is quite robust
between the snow stake,
and the hobo snowmelt timing.
We look at Carter Notch, we have less data to examine.
Not a bad relationship,
but they're, you know, not a great end value here.
But it's, it's not too bad.
And the other thing is,
is this data only spans 20 days.
And the hobo is earlier in this, in this site.
And then the same for Zealand Falls,
a scatter of data,
the relationship is not as great,
but hobo again is melting out earlier.
So the other piece that I mentioned earlier,
is the Community Snow Observation Program.
It's a campaign to measure snow
by back country recreationists.
Anyone can participate.
All you need to do is have the app and a snow stick,
you know, whether that's an avalanche probe,
or a just a yardstick,
has to be in meters though, centimeters,
because that's what the app will take.
You can go to this website to learn more.
Oops. Go back.
And then this paper's a really,
if you wanna learn more about
how this data has been utilized out West,
because this program started out west,
it's a great paper because he,
he not only puts the community
snow observers as a co-author,
which I think is really cool for citizen science,
but it shows how much this data improves
in all snow models as they look
to expand from the site data
to interpolate across the landscape,
that this data is really helping out in that aspect.
So community snow has been going on
for a number of years, and it started out west.
Here's our little eastern blob, we gotta expand,
but you can see that this is an international program,
and it's, you know, they're a great group to work with.
So what about locally in the White Mountains?
Again, this is the White Mountain National Forest,
and it's a closeup of our sites.
So over here is Carter Notch, Pinkham Notch,
Hermit Lake, which is up in elevation.
The elevations are also here.
Highland Center over here in Crawford, Notch Zealand,
and then Lonesome Lake,
which is over here in Franconia Notch,
or adjacent to it.
So the dots are the CSO measurements.
Got cut off,
but those are CSO measurements that have been taken
again over the 2017 to 2022 I believe.
So you can see a scattering,
you can see that some people are doing like
along the trails, which is great.
We don't want people going off into the hinterlands
and getting, you know, lost.
But it also is adding around these sites
where we have permanent plots.
So what is it doing?
So remember that plot I showed you of 2023,
now it's a really busy plot,
but please pay attention to where the red is, the red dots.
That is the CSO data in that same year.
So you can see it's following the general pattern.
There's lots of people out when you know,
we got a lot of snow.
And then, you know, it peters off.
And one of the things
I've been talking to others about is,
how do we get people out there
when the snow is going away?
Because that's actually,
the snowmelt is really important to us.
And so we wanna, we wanna,
did you gimme a... Yeah. Okay.
And so looking at this data in another way,
if we look at elevation, these are permanent plots,
both our plots, and the main snow survey data,
which actually is in New Hampshire,
and then you fill it in at CSO.
And so you can really see how
this data adds across elevation.
And you can also see that CSO folks are capturing
this upper elevation deeper snow,
that this data says isn't,
this is the observatory over here,
where all the snow blows off on Mount Washington,
so it makes sense that this would peter off,
but it is nice that they're capturing
something our permanent plots are not.
And again, a closeup of Pinkham Notch,
and the snow data.
And this is just showing that indeed,
the CSO data is getting deeper
snow than the permanent plot,
and this may be due to
where those are being taken at different elevations,
or that they're, the citizen scientists are,
you know, again skewed to,
"Oh it's snowed.
Let me go out and take a measurement."
So there's probably some bias there.
So where are we going?
We're gonna work with satellite imagery to
see if we can get snowmelt timing from that,
merge all of these different data sets,
and continue to promote CSO.
Some of the, some of that's right there.
We're having a February snow blitz,
there's contests, you can win stuff.
And then linking snow depth to plant phonology
is one of our key, key goals in the future.
And then I wanted to mention the Northeast Snow study.
I know I'm running out of time,
but if you're interested in helping us
basically identify where people are
collecting snow information,
and/or interested in snow information,
you can go to those QR codes,
and help us fill out surveys that would
help us collect this information as we
look to figure out where new snow monitoring
could be helpful in the Northeast.
So I might leave it there,
although I do wanna say thank you to so many people
that are involved in this, and have no questions,
but I'm gonna leave it on this slide,
in case people wanna take a photo.
Thank you, Georgia.
So we've got about a minute,
two minutes for questions.
Does anybody have any questions?
Georgia, I'm Beverly (indistinct) with (indistinct).
Fantastic Work.
It's like so important to have this monitoring.
Can you say anything about partnerships
with researchers at like the state universities
across for NESS data Data?
Yeah, well Sarah is, is very tied in already
to the University of New Hampshire with Liz Borkowski,
and the Nest Project itself is sort of like,
that's part of what I think is gonna come out of that,
is even more collaboration
across different people doing this work.
But yeah, I think we,
we have an eye towards making sure
we're trying to connect with people.
So if you know of other people
that we should connect with, we should do that.
I think it would be great.
We, you know, we're very open
to working with partners,
and figuring out how to amplify all of our resources,
to get a better picture of,
of northeastern mountain snow. So.
Is there currently something being done
on top of, well the mountain itself,
and (indistinct).
(indistinct)
I'll check out the poster then.
All these QR codes.
Thank you so much.