This award is for support of a two year proof-of-concept project to deploy a newly designed and tested instrument which will allow quantitative measurements (with high temporal resolution) of snow accumulation, mixing and erosion. The instrument disperses inert time markers in the snow surface at fixed time intervals which allows a quantitative measure of snow accumulation rate and its spatial uniformity. This work has important applications to the interpretation of paleoclimatic records from snow pits and ice cores.
