SNOWSCAPE2026 Begins

I'm supposedly on sabbatical this academic year, but the reality is that I've been working a ton with colleagues at the University of Utah and institutions planning, preparing, and now executing the SNOWSCAPE2026 field campaign.

SNOWSCAPE is an acronym for the Seeded and Natural Orographic Winter Storms and CAtchment Processes Evaluation Project, with 2026 indicating that it is being held during the 2026 water year (we hope we may be able to do this in future years too).  This is the largest field campaign examining winter storms in northern Utah since the Intermountain Precipitation Experiment (IPEX) in 2000 and also includes a major snow hydrology component.  

SNOWSCAPE is specifically examining winter-storm processes and the impacts of cloud seeding on snowfall, snowpack accumulation, snowmelt, and runoff in Utah's northern Wasatch Mountains and the lower Weber and Ogden basins.  We have established a one-of-a-kind transect of observing sites from the eastern end of the Antelope Island Causeway, over Snowbasin, to Huntsville to document changes in storm characteristics from the Wasatch Front lowlands to the mountain valleys.  Along or near this transect we have weather cameras, precipitation gauges, lidar ceilometers (which measure cloud base and precipitation characteristics), microwave radiometers (which provide profiles of temperature and cloud liquid water), profiling radars, snow-energy balance stations, and streamflow gauges.  We also have an aerosol sampling system at Powder Mountain that is measuring the characteristics of small particles in the atmosphere that can serve as the seeds of cloud droplet formation or ice crystal formation in clouds.  

Below is some data from the lidar ceilometer and microwave radiometer at Snowbasin from yesterday.  The lidar helps to identify cloud base and even snowfall below cloud base (top image).  The microwave radiometer provides profiles of the amount of supercooled liquid water in the cloud (bottom image).  In this case, the cloud was comprised of both ice crystals (some of which grew large enough to fall out as light snow at times) and supercooled liquid water droplets, with high concentrations up to about 3500 m MSL (11,000 ft).   

We have also positioned scanning Doppler on Wheels (DOW) radars on the Antelope Island Causeway and in east Huntsville to examine in fine detail the structure of storms across the Wasatch Range.  Compared to most weather radars you are probably familiar with, these radars are more sensitive, higher resolution, and can be programmed to scan vertically.  Below is a radar image from yesterday from the Huntsville site showing light precipitation in the Ogden and Morgan Valleys, areas where the National Weather Service Radar on Promontory Point is blocked by the northern Wasatch.  

We're super excited now to really dig into some storms, but Mother Nature is not being cooperative.  After today's snowshowers, the forecast is dry with a "death ridge" along the west coast for at least the next few days and in many ensemble forecasts beyond that.  So, I have both personal and professional reasons for hoping we get a needed pattern change.  

I hope to share some exciting observations at some point in the future.