Transcript for Travis Roth

I'm Travis Roth. I'm a PhD student

at OSU. I'm working in the Water Resoucre

Engineering Program.

In the future we're seeing some of these

scenarios that these low-level, low elevation

mountains, like we have in the western Cascades,

are going to be seeing less snow

and more of this precipitation coming down

as rain. So our job is to see how that

is going to effect our streams,

how is that going to effect our ground water,

and ultimately downstream users:

agricultural, urban uses, and

there's also the recreation component as well.

We're very concerned with how our streams

are interacting with manmade obstacles

such as dams. How it's interacting with

maybe the snow melt component,

if we're getting less snow is that changing

the temperature dynamics within the stream.

So I work with fiber-optic technology,

which basically is what you'll see

in the telecommunications industry.

And what we do is we shoot

light pulses down the fiber-optic

cable and, based on some of this

back scatter and the time of light travel we

can get discrete measurements of temperature

at every meter down the profile

of this fiber-optic cable.

And that can be tens of kilometers.

And we can get it in to a hundredth of a

degree Celsius accuracy.

So we use these fiber-optic technologies so

we can really pick up these discreet

changes, I guess, within the stream.

And we can find a way to maybe

pinpoint where these cold waters are coming

in. And from there we can model

and we can understand the whole system

as a whole so we can address these problems

as case-by-case basis.