Just when you’d finally convinced yourself your career choice is making a difference, along comes Toby Minear with his work.
Minear is a fluvial geomorphologist. That means in his work at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado he studies surface water bodies — rivers, mainly — and measures flows and conditions within them. He also worked with NASA on the Surface Water and Ocean Technology satellite, which measures the height, or surface level, and width of water bodies larger than 10,000 square feet. And when it’s time to check SWOT’s work, he jumps in a boat and takes field measurements of the rivers SWOT has observed.
That part of his job has taken him down the Colorado and the South Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi. He’s also fact checked the North Saskatchewan and the Peace-Athabasca Delta, both in Alberta, Canada. And his work has critical global applications, especially in places like Africa and Greenland which he says use few if any water tracking gages.
“We’re basically trying to track how much water is where on the landscape,” he said. “Currently, we don’t have a sense of how much freshwater comes off the continents and flows into oceans.” And that information is key to predicting things like changes in water supply and runoff into the sea.
To read the entire story, visit The Colorado Sun.