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Field notes on the October 2022 install and reflections from the Sublimation of Snow Project Principal Investigator Jessica Lundquist.

A single snowflake hadn’t yet fallen when a team of snow researchers descended on a small town in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains this past fall. But that was intentional — they were preparing for the coming winter’s mission to answer a longstanding research question: What happens to snow after it falls?

In October, Sublimation of Snow project research partners installed a suite of field instruments to fill in data gaps on the poorly understood process of how snow behaves in windy mountain environments.

Snow sublimation, the process through which snow turns directly from a solid to a gas (water vapor) without first melting, may remove up to 90% of snowpack from the ground, but the process is not well understood. The goal of the SOS project is to improve and communicate fundamental scientific understanding of when, where, and how much snow is lost the atmosphere through sublimation.

“I've never witnessed such extreme weather events. It was the first time that I realized…how bad things could be in that region, how quickly things were changing.” -- Dr. Heïdi Sevestre, glaciologist