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.