Project Overview

The Snow Data System is a research effort that provides data management and processing support to ongoing efforts at better quantifying the effect that airborne dust and pollutants are having on the melt rates of the world’s major snow packs. Data obtained from remote sensing and in-situ instruments are collected, archived, and processed into products, many near-real-time, which are then used by a broad spectrum of downstream consumers including the U.S. Army, the climate science community, and state and regional water resource planning commissions.

How I Contributed

My role on this project was to develop a data collection framework for obtaining hourly measurements from a scattered network of in-situ weather stations in remote locations in the western Rocky Mountains. COTS software was used for the communication link with the towers themselves, and I wrote a series of Python scripts to transform and harmonize the data from different instruments so that it could be stored and analyzed as a single collection downstream. Next, I designed a web-based user interface for ad-hoc investigation of the collected data, including the ability to plot data from multiple stations side by side over variable time periods. Finally, I implemented and documented a set of RESTful web services to allow users to quickly and intuitively subset the data and retrieve interesting data in various formats.