NASA Unveils SNOWWI: Revolutionary Radar for Measuring Snow Mass to Combat Climate Change

JAKARTA – Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO). NASA and several researchers from the University of Massachusetts are developing a radar that can measure snow mass. This radar is called SNOWWI.

Currently, climate change is causing many changes, both in summer and winter. This phenomenon has many effects, one of which is changes in the level of annual fresh water supply in several states.

According to NASA’s definition, mountainous areas should drain water into rivers, reservoirs and places where communities provide fresh water during the summer. Unfortunately, the flow of water is slowing down as winter reaches its peak.

Therefore, NASA and researchers developed SNOWWI, a dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar that is expected to help the science community. This technology has been developed in prototype form and has been tested by NASA.

At the beginning of this year, the SNOWWI prototype was successfully flown on a small twin-engine aircraft. Not only did it fly successfully, this prototype also managed to collect data regarding the winter snow cover in the area.

“I would say the big improvement is that we’ve gone from hardware in the lab to something that produces meaningful data,” said Paul Siqueira, University of Massachusetts Engineering Professor.

At the same time, a researcher named Derksen said that SNOWWI uses two frequencies, namely low and high. Both frequencies are essential for checking the consistency of the snow cover and determining its total depth.

“With two frequencies, we can better separate the effect of snow microstructure from the effect of snow depth,” said Derksen. “One frequency is good, two frequencies are better.”

SNOWWI, abbreviation of Wide Swath Interferometer and Snow Water Equivalent Scatterometer, they can map 100 square kilometers of snowy terrain in 30 minutes. This mapping was done at an altitude of 4 kilometers.

The higher the range, the wider the view, so NASA and the University of Massachusetts want to put SNOWWI in space. Once developed, this instrument will be launched via a satellite mission.