Megan Mason

Megan Mason holds Dissolved Oxygen meter probe in Spillway Lake outlet to collect water quality data, Yosemite National Park.

Megan Mason worked on the Sierra Nevada Network lakes crew in 2015 and 2016, while working as a Physical Science Technician for Yosemite National Park. On this crew, Megan hiked to randomly selected lakes in Yosemite, as well as a few in Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks. At these lakes, she and one other crew member collected water samples from mid-lake sites using small rafts to paddle to the center of the lake and from lake outlets. They filtered samples in the field, hiked them out, and sent them off to a lab for water chemistry analyses. While in the field, they also measured water temperature, dissolved oxygen, and specific conductance using hand-held water quality meters. They conducted amphibian surveys around lake shorelines, searching for the federally endangered mountain yellow-legged frogs, as well as other species.

Megan measuring the snow density at Banner Summit in Idaho. Triangular holder (density cutter) is 1000 cubic cm, so scientists weigh it and sample the density every 10 cm vertically in a snow pit.

Why Graduate School?

“I was very inspired to pursue a graduate degree after my first summer spent in the Sierra,” Megan explained. “Upon my first outing with Yosemite’s Physical Science and Landscape Ecology staff, I was really impressed with the background and academic paths of my colleagues. They all offered insightful literature and recent studies to support all the current park projects."

"After conducting fieldwork based on peer-reviewed monitoring protocols, my interest peaked in taking on a project that involved more data analysis, especially around the topic of water resources after seeing firsthand the effect drought years had on the Sierra and greater California region,” Megan said.

Megan saw the benefits of her hydrology work for Yosemite as she witnessed the effect their fieldwork had on the stakeholders who in return invested in hydrology research for the greater San Francisco Bay Area – “I saw our data get turned over and presented at annual hydrology meetings, where water managers and scientists partnered to make informed decisions for water allocation in a place famous for water scarcity.”

Megan earned her Master's degree is in Geophysics. She studied snow science with the Cryosphere Geophysics and Remote Sensing Lab under Dr. Hans-Peter Marshall at Boise State University in Idaho.

Research Focus

On June 26, 2020, Megan successfully defended her Master’s thesis. Her research focused on Tuolumne River Basin in the high country of Yosemite National Park. Using a six-year time series of snow depth data, she studied the extent to which snow depth patterns are repeated from season to season and their duration within a season. This information can improve hydrologic models that forecast streamflow and snowmelt timing. While her research was not field-based, it provided an opportunity to understand the analysis side of processing a large dataset. Through her coursework and research, Megan has developed a skillset for computer programming and discovered the benefits of writing algorithms to create reproducible science.

Megan uses the SnowMicroPen to measure snow layer hardness, which provides information at the grain-size scale about snow.

Contributing to NASA SnowEx Campaign

Although her research did not have a field component, Megan was able to contribute ample field time to a NASA-funded SnowEx Campaign.

"This multi-year field effort seeks to create ground, air, and spaceborne datasets suitable to determine the best ensemble of instruments to estimate water in the form of snow globally,” Megan explained. “Believe it or not, the snow community has not yet quantified how much water this planet stores as snow!”

During the first field component, nine sites in the western US conducted weekly snow measurements to coincide with airborne observations. Megan’s role was to dig two snow pits per week at two sites in Idaho. The second effort was an intensive observation period in Grand Mesa, Colorado, where 30 people dug 150+ snow pits to record snow stratigraphy, and grain types, density, depth and other structural measurements. Other measurements occur through ground-based radar systems, airborne radars and lidar, and repeat satellites.

To learn more about this effort, you can explore this link to an article and video about the NASA SnowEx campaign (on a NASA web page).

Megan Mason, second from right, poses with Sierra Nevada Network colleagues at Vogelsang Pass enroute to Upper Florence Lake in Yosemite National Park.

Looking Forward and Back

Megan will continue to work with the SnowEx project through summer 2021 as a Science / Data Management Liaison. She will facilitate collaboration efforts with the National Snow and Ice Data Center to publish the snow datasets for public use, making them available for research and modeling efforts.

What does Megan miss most about working with the Sierra Nevada Network (SIEN)?

Without a doubt, what I miss most is the community that SIEN fostered (and maybe a refreshing jump in an alpine lake!). SIEN did such a wonderful job at checking in, providing resources to make fieldwork safe and enjoyable, and always rooted in favor of the crew’s success and achievements.

The common link between my Sierra summers with SIEN and graduate school is the network of people that it involves. Don’t get me wrong, backpacking and skiing for fieldwork alone is a dream come true, but at the end of the day I am so fortunate to grow in understanding earth science and hydrology by the colleagues I overlap with. This network fuels momentum for the type of work we do and that has been ever so present both at SIEN and within the graduate school community.

For her undergraduate degree, Megan studied geology at Beloit College in Wisconsin – the Geology Department offered unique opportunities that helped lead to her summers spent as a field technician.