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Researchers track the movement of charred detritus dispersed from Goleta Beach in the wake of the 2018 Montecito debris flow

February 17, 2021 at 12:30 am by Sean Crommelin Jeff Dozier, distinguished professor emeritus and the founding dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, first sought to understand snow grains while at 20,000 feet in the Hindu Kush mountain range of Afghanistan.  A six meter deep snow pit located near Emerald Lake. Courtesy of Jeff Dozier. “My colleagues, two partners that I was with at the time while climbing, asked ‘Are we in avalanche danger?’...

Housing and Development Newsletter “Clearly, in the Sierra, the amount of snowfall and its variability is the key driving variable,” said Melack. “However, making that connection through the hydrology and limnology has not been done anywhere else as clearly as I think it has in this book.” Dozier concurred. “The huge interannual variability in the snowpack — and thus the precipitation — makes it difficult to pick out trends,” he said. He hopes the book will provide a clearer acc...

A simple yet fitting name adorns California’s most prominent mountains: Sierra Nevada, or “snow-capped mountain range” in Spanish. The Sierra snowpack is the driving force behind the range’s hydrology and ecology, and it serves as a crucial reservoir for much of the thirsty state in which it lies. “People think of gold as being key for California’s history, which of course it was,” said aquatic biologist John Melack, a distinguished professor at UC Santa Barbara, “but really, th...