Assessing mechanical properties of the snow pack is essential to provide ground truth for remote sensing and to predict the propensity of snow to slide and its ability to support platforms. Currently, the most common method to do this assessment is to dig a number of large holes in the field. CAPACITEC thus proposes to develop a field penetration probe for measuring profiles of snow density, wetness, temperature and, if commercially viable, grain size. The telescopic probe will be packaged in a composite pole and its electronics will fit in a lightweight belt-pack. Development of the probe will begin in Phase I with the design and construction of a portable capacitance instrument to record profiles of the real and imaginary components of snow dielectric constant, with a measurement volume narrow enough to resolve thin layers in the snow pack. By scanning dielectric permittivity from 10 to 100 Khz, this instrument has the potential to infer both density and wetness for arbitrary snows. This project will combine our company's expertise in designing sensitive capacitance instruments with the successful utilization of similar probes for measuring snow density by our collaborators at Cornell University. Phase I will demonstrate feasibility of a medium cost, low power, portable, lightweight instrument for field measurements of snow density, wetness and temperature. The instrument will find widespread use in the civil engineering and recreation industries as well as in snow research, avalanche warning, and hydrology.
