Transcript for Eric Sproles

My name is Eric Sproles,

and I'm a PhD student in

water resource science.

About 50% of the precipitation that

comes down in the Oregon Cascades

comes as snow.

And it's a huge part of the water

that you see in the streams later in the year.

And the two degree temperature increase

some of the snow at lower elevations

will be rain. It simply won't be snow.

The winter time implications of that are

that you'll have higher flow-

the river flows will quite a bit higher.

And then it also gives you a higher

likelihood of flooding because you have

more precipitation falling as rain, less as snow.

Again, it transitions up higher.

You have the melt begins earlier,

so you have less of a natural reservoir

building up, and more just of a- of rain.

My research looks at

where the snow is, mapping the snow

throughout the Oregon Cascades.

Right now water resource decisions

are made on measurements at

one or two points within an

entire river basin.

What my research does is it

maps snowpack throughout a river basin.

The second part of my research is to work

with water resource managers to develop

tools, in a framework, that

allow scientific knowledge and information

to be easily understood and used

by water resource managers too.

So to not just give them scientific data, or

the data from our research, but to give them actually information

that they can use in day-to-day decisions.