Eric Sproles
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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.