University of California, Santa Barbara
Bren School for Environmental Science & Management - Master of Environmental Data Science
Capstone Project - June 2022

An open source workflow for processing and visualizing data from the Snow Today research team.

Scientists at the UCSB Earth Research Institute help communicate remotely sensed snow conditions through the Snow Today website, which presents daily images and monthly updates of snow variables, such as snow cover and albedo. The data used to generate these insights are available on the website, but since the analysis is completed with Matlab, a proprietary computational software system, the workflow does not follow open-source data practices. Remotely sensed snow data provides valuable information, but technical expertise can be a barrier to extracting meaningful insights from this data. This Capstone project addresses these limitations by creating an open-source workflow that improves the usability of snow data through interactive web-based visualizations and Python-based tutorials. As the impacts of climate change continue to affect snow conditions, the improved usability of Snow Today’s datasets allows for customized analyses of snow data for specific regions of interest to support decision making for water supply allocation, hydrologic research, and recreational planning.

The Capstone project technical documentation can be viewed here.

View our project presentation delivered at the UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management MEDS Public Presentations on May 26, 2022 here. Timestamp: 32:00-46:00.

Four public repositories form the foundation of the Snow Today GitHub organization and Capstone Project.

• The snow_today_shiny_app repository hosts the web application developed to showcase our Project’s interactive visualization deliverables.
• Tutorials contain three Python notebooks that aid snow data users in downloading, accessing, processing, and visualizing the National Snow and Ice Data Center's (NSIDC) Snow Today snow cover and albedo datasets.
• The third repository hosts our Project's technical documentation. The Technical Documentation provides a functional discussion of the Snow Today Capstone project’s objectives, solution design, products, testing, and user documentation.
• Data processing has python notebooks that create stacked GeoTIFF files of snow cover percent and albedo for each water year.

Review our organization's Codes of Conduct - a guideline of expectations for our community.

Suggestions for improvements to the code or documentation is welcome and encouraged, though please be aware that moderation of this organization will be limited after August 2022. Please submit questions, comments, or code via issues or pull requests on the relevant repository, or contact the creators of this project organization via GitHub links listed in the Students section below.

Students

🏂 Ryan Munnikhuis, ☃️ Julia Parish, ⛷️ Marie Rivers

Faculty Advisors

Dr. Allison Horst, Bren School for Environmental Science & Management
Dr. Sam Stevenson, Bren School for Environmental Science & Management

Clients

Timbo Stillinger, UCSB Earth Research Institute
Ned Bair, UCSB Earth Research Institute
Karl Rittger, CU Boulder Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research

Additional Project Information
For more information on the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management's Master of Environmental Data Science (MEDS) program, please visit here.

To learn about the MEDS Capstone projects, please visit here.