The Mountain Hydrology Group is primarily focused on the processes controlling hydrologic fluxes in cold regions and within the greater Earth system. Improved understanding of these processes is essential for sustainable management of natural resources and for making informed environmental policy decisions. Group research projects use ground-based observations, remote sensing, and computational modeling to obtain comprehensive understanding of hydrological processes: in particular the distribution of snow.
Additional projects aim at developing techniques for scaling hydrological processes and for designing ground-based observation networks tailored for integration with remote sensing and modeling. Studies relating fluxes of water, carbon, and nitrogen are also a focus of the group’s current projects: in particular the feedbacks between water availability and carbon cycling in montane forests.