A $2 million federal grant has been awarded to researchers at the University of California at Merced. The funds will be used to track the Sierra snowpack as the climate changes using sensors. The four year project is being supported by the National Science Foundation.
Instruments like these will make measuring the Sierra Nevada snowpack easier and more accurate.
UC Merced professor Roger Bales, director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, and UC Berkeley professor Steven Glaser will lead the research team. The team is to install a huge web of wireless sensors in the American River Basin covering 2,000 square miles in the Sierra region north east of Sacramento.
Glaser said that the goal was to provide a real-time water supply information tool for an array of managers. Optimal usage of the scarce water supply requires that we know how much there is, where it is and where it is going, he added.
The team has been experimenting with the technology around Shaver Lake in Fresno County and the American River. Bales said that they believed this type of wireless sensor network could ultimately revolutionize the way they understood their most important sources of water, both in California and elsewhere.