$2 mil. grant awarded UC Merced to study Sierra snowpack
By Mark Grossi, Fresno Bee
Researchers from UC Merced were awarded a $2 million federal grant to develop a revolutionary network for tracking the Sierra snowpack as the climate warms.
The National Science Foundation money will support a four-year project to install a massive web of wireless sensors in the 2,000-square-mile American River Basin in the Sierra northeast of Sacramento.
The network will give water managers precise information to predict snowmelt, a main source of water for millions of residents and the $35 billion farming industry. The data will become more important as the snowpack retreats to higher ground in a warming climate.
The research team is led by UC Merced professor Roger Bales, director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, and UC Berkeley professor Steven Glaser. For several years, the team has been experimenting with the technology around Shaver Lake in Fresno County and the American River.
“As the climate warms” is not a fact. But there is sure a lot of money in it for the “research and study community.”
BTW, lets return Tahoe to the way it was 10,000 years ago when hundreds of feet of ice covered the region.
The money could have been better spent on our infrastructure – roadways.
More proof that for government, there is no fiscal crisis. The buckets of money are limitless.
OK Turnip truck. I am sure I have asked this before…
Show us some research that shows that the earth is not warming as a result of our use of fossil fuels.
This is not a matter of opinion, these are scientific facts at the heart of this discussion.
Steve-You said it! And worth noting that people, at the taxpayer’s expense, are profiting from “Global Warming”! Well, that is unless those professors are working for free?
I wish the following scenario was possible:
Everyone who does not support a publicly funded project can get their % back (.0001% or so). And also gives up all rights to the benefits of the project.
So in this case, you can get you penny. And then a few decades from now your access to water will be less secure, more costly, and you will have no information for planning for the water years in the future.
The climate is changing, at a rate too fast for most species to deal with. Deal with it. We are lucky, we can figure this out and plan for the future.
This is actually one of those project that in hypothetical a world where humans have nothing to do with climate change, this still makes sense.
“The network will give water managers precise information to predict snowmelt, a main source of water for millions of residents and the $35 billion farming industry. The data will become more important as the snowpack retreats to higher ground in a warming climate.”
All that, for $2.1M. And you will all benefit from it. And give your programmed conservative response about how bad it is to incest $2M into providing information for a $35B a year industry in your state.
I wish you all into a world without the benefits of science. See you in 50 years, when the earth is still warming, and you the skeptics still don’t have any science to support them….
Yes, Al Gore has made well over 2 mil. scaring people about Global Warming. So what these professors are taking in is small by comparison! And Mr. Gore’s buying a house right by the ocean shows how sacred he is about the rising tides he was warning about.
And when it was snowing in Placerville, and even Mt. Diablo this past Winter, this ‘science’ about snowpack retreating to higher elevations sure didn’t seem to exactly ring true!
Another thing skeptics fail to acknowledge: The possibility that the volumes of data being collected could end up supporting their position. Imagine that, some science to support your position….