May 16, 20253 min readTornadoes Expected to Strike Multiple States This Weekend in One of the Worst Seasons This DecadeTornadoes are predicted across swaths of the U.S. in the coming days, likely adding to this year’s already high tally of such stormsBy Meghan Bartels edited by Dean Visser Thomas Trott/Getty ImagesTornadoes threaten huge swaths of the U.S. this weekend amid a season already marked by unusually high storm activity, even as the National Weather Service faces budget cuts likely to impede its ability to respond to severe weather.What to ExpectThe National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center has forecast severe thunderstorms with scattered tornadoes—some of them intense—across parts of Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas and Ohio for the afternoon and evening of May 16.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.“Today we’re expecting a severe weather outbreak across the mid-Mississippi, Tennessee and Ohio valleys,” says Jenni Pittman, a meteorologist and deputy chief of the Science and Technology Integration division at the National Weather Service’s Central Region Headquarters. These regions stretch farther east than the historically prevalent “Tornado Alley” of the mid- to late 1900s.“Then we see a renewed chance for severe weather Sunday, continuing Monday and continuing Tuesday as well,” Pittman says. “A lot of the risks on Sunday through Tuesday are going to be from the High Plains pretty much through the Midwest.” National Weather Service maps show these risks concentrated in Kansas and Oklahoma.This weekend’s predicted tornadoes would follow a slight lull in the region, she adds. “We’ve had a little bit of a break here in May, which is typically a pretty busy severe weather month,” Pittman says. “April was very active, and the rest of May does look pretty active as well.”This Year in TornadoesAs of May 15, the National Weather Service has tallied 779 tornadoes in its local storm reports—a preliminary number but a helpful metric for tracking the season’s severity. For comparison, between 2005 and 2015, that same tally averaged 624; between 2010 and 2024, it was 592.“As of mid-May, the U.S. is running well above the typical number of tornadoes to this point in the year,” says Rich Thompson, chief of forecast operations for the Storm Prediction Center.This year to date also stands out against individual years. The most active tornado season of recent years was 2011, when hundreds of storms struck in late April; by mid-May the tally stood at more than 1,300 storms, with more than 2,200 by the end of the year.That year also demonstrated the close connection between just a few days of serious storms and a bad season. “Intense tornadoes are disproportionately responsible for damage, injuries and deaths, and such tornadoes are more common on a few ‘outbreak’ days,” Thompson says. “Thus, the number of outbreak days often determines the severity of the season, with 2011 being the prime example of multiple high-impact tornado outbreaks.”Overall, this year is more on par with last year, which had seen 815 tornado reports by this point in the season. Notably, one third of those storms have occurred during just three outbreak days in March and April, Thompson says.Matthew TwomblyWhat to KnowIf you live in an area where tornadoes are forecast, follow local weather and emergency response offices closely. In general, experts recommend having supplies available to shelter in place and having a safety plan for pets as well as humans. Pittman also recommends that people have multiple ways to stay on top of weather alerts (such as through broadcasts on television and on battery-powered radios, outdoor sirens and fully charged mobile phones).During an event, the National Weather Service recommends that people living where a severe thunderstorm watch is active head to “an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building.”If you’re caught away from shelter, the calculus becomes more complicated. In a vehicle, if a storm is still at a distance, you may be able evade it by driving at a right angle to the tornado’s apparent approach. If already caught in the winds, park instead, and either keep your seat belt fastened and protect your head and neck or get out of the car if there’s someplace safe to lie below the elevation of the roadway. Avoid sheltering under bridges, however, which don’t offer much protection, experts note.

On a crisp morning in early April, Dan McEvoy and Bjoern Bingham cut clean lines down a wide run at the Heavenly Ski Resort in South Lake Tahoe, then ducked under a rope line cordoning off a patch of untouched snow.  They side-stepped up a small incline, poled past a row of Jeffrey pines, then dropped their packs.  The pair of climate researchers from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada, skied down to this research plot in the middle of the resort to test out a new way to take the temperature of the Sierra Nevada snowpack. They were equipped with an experimental infrared device that can take readings as it’s lowered down a hole in the snow to the ground. The Sierra’s frozen reservoir provides about a third of California’s water and most of what comes out of the faucets, shower heads, and sprinklers in the towns and cities of northwestern Nevada. As it melts through the spring and summer, dam operators, water agencies, and communities have to manage the flow of billions of gallons of runoff, storing up enough to get through the inevitable dry summer months without allowing reservoirs and canals to flood. The need for better snowpack temperature data has become increasingly critical for predicting when the water will flow down the mountains, as climate change fuels hotter weather, melts snow faster, and drives rapid swings between very wet and very dry periods.  In the past, it has been arduous work to gather such snowpack observations. Now, a new generation of tools, techniques, and models promises to ease that process, improve water forecasts, and help California and other states safely manage one of their largest sources of water in the face of increasingly severe droughts and flooding. Observers, however, fear that any such advances could be undercut by the Trump administration’s cutbacks across federal agencies, including the one that oversees federal snowpack monitoring and survey work. That could jeopardize ongoing efforts to produce the water data and forecasts on which Western communities rely. “If we don’t have those measurements, it’s like driving your car around without a fuel gauge,” says Larry O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist. “We won’t know how much water is up in the mountains, and whether there’s enough to last through the summer.” The birth of snow surveys The snow survey program in the US was born near Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America, around the turn of the 20th century.  Without any reliable way of knowing how much water would flow down the mountain each spring, lakefront home and business owners, fearing floods, implored dam operators to release water early in the spring. Downstream communities and farmers pushed back, however, demanding that the dam was used to hold onto as much water as possible to avoid shortages later in the year.  In 1908, James Church, a classics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, whose passion for hiking around the mountains sparked an interest in the science of snow, invented a device that helped resolve the so-called Lake Tahoe Water Wars: the Mt. Rose snow sampler, named after the peak of a Sierra spur that juts into Nevada. James Church, a professor of classics at the University of Nevada, Reno, became a pioneer in the field of snow surveys.COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO It’s a simple enough device, with sections of tube that screw together, a sharpened end, and measurement ticks along the side. Snow surveyors measure the depth of the snow by plunging the sampler down to the ground. They then weigh the filled tube on a specialized scale to calculate the water content of the snow.  Church used the device to take measurements at various points across the range, and calibrated his water forecasts by comparing his readings against the rising and falling levels of Lake Tahoe.  It worked so well that the US began a federal snow survey program in the mid-1930s, which evolved into the one carried on today by the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Throughout the winter, hundreds of snow surveyors across the American West head up to established locations on snowshoes, backcountry skis, or snowmobiles to deploy their Mt. Rose samplers, which have barely changed over more than a century.  In the 1960s, the US government also began setting up a network of permanent monitoring sites across the mountains, now known as the SNOTEL network. There are more than 900 stations continuously transmitting readings from across Western states and Alaska. They’re equipped with sensors that measure air temperature, snow depth, and soil moisture, and include pressure-sensitive “snow pillows” that weigh the snow to determine the water content.  The data from the snow surveys and SNOTEL sites all flows into snow depth and snow water content reports that the NRCS publishes, along with forecasts of the amount of water that will fill the streams and reservoirs through the spring and summer. Taking the temperature None of these survey and monitoring programs, however, provide the temperature throughout the snowpack.  The Sierra Nevada snowpack can reach more than 6 meters (20 feet), and the temperature within it may vary widely, especially toward the top. Readings taken at increments throughout can determine what’s known as the cold content, or the amount of energy required to shift the snowpack to a uniform temperature of 32˚F.  Knowing the cold content of the snowpack helps researchers understand the conditions under which it will begin to rapidly melt, particularly as it warms up in the spring or after rain falls on top of the snow. If the temperature of the snow, for example, is close to 32˚F even at several feet deep, a few warm days could easily set it melting. If, on the other hand, the temperature measurements show a colder profile throughout the middle, the snowpack is more stable and will hold up longer as the weather warms. Bjoern Bingham, a research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, digs at snowpit at a research plot within the Heavenly Ski Resort, near South Lake Tahoe, California. JAMES TEMPLE The problem is that taking the temperature of the entire snowpack has been, until now, tough and time-consuming work. When researchers do it at all, they mainly do so by digging snow pits down to the ground and then taking readings with probe thermometers along an inside wall. There have been a variety of efforts to take continuous remote readings from sensors attached to fences, wires, or towers, which the snowpack eventually buries. But the movement and weight of the dense shifting snow tends to break the devices or snap the structures they’re assembled upon.“They rarely last a season,” McAvoy says. Anne Heggli, a professor of mountain hydrometeorology at DRI, happened upon the idea of using an infrared device to solve this problem during a tour of the institute’s campus in 2019, when she learned that researchers there were using an infrared meat thermometer to take contactless readings of the snow surface. In 2021, Heggli began collaborating with RPM Systems, a gadget manufacturing company, to design an infrared device optimized for snowpack field conditions. The resulting snow temperature profiler is skinny enough to fit down a hole dug by snow surveyors and dangles on a cord marked off at 10-centimeter (4-inch) increments. Bingham and Daniel McEvoy, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute, work together to take temperature readings from inside the snowpit as well as from within the hole left behind by a snow sampler.JAMES TEMPLE At Heavenly on that April morning, Bingham, a staff scientist at DRI, slowly fed the device down a snow sampler hole, calling out temperature readings at each marking. McEvoy scribbled them down on a worksheet fastened to his clipboard as he used a probe thermometer to take readings of his own from within a snow pit the pair had dug down to the ground. They were comparing the measurements to assess the reliability of the infrared device in the field, but the eventual aim is to eliminate the need to dig snow pits. The hope is that state and federal surveyors could simply carry along a snow temperature profiler and drop it into the snowpack survey holes they’re creating anyway, to gather regular snowpack temperature readings from across the mountains. In 2023, the US Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that operates many of the nation’s dams, funded a three-year research project to explore the use of the infrared gadgets in determining snowpack temperatures. Through it, the DRI research team has now handed devices out to 20 snow survey teams across California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah to test their use in the field and supplement the snowpack data they’re collecting. The Snow Lab The DRI research project is one piece of a wider effort to obtain snowpack temperature data across the mountains of the West. By early May, the snow depth had dropped from an April peak of 114 inches to 24 inches (2.9 meters to 0.6 meters) at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab, an aging wooden structure perched in the high mountains northwest of Lake Tahoe. Megan Mason, a research scientist at the lab, used a backcountry ski shovel to dig out a trio of instruments from what was left of the pitted snowpack behind the building. Each one featured different types of temperature sensors, arrayed along a strong polymer beam meant to hold up under the weight and movement of the Sierra snowpack.  She was pulling up the devices after running the last set of observations for the season, as part of an effort to develop a resilient system that can survive the winter and transmit hourly temperature readings. The lab is working on the project, dubbed the California Cold Content Initiative, in collaboration with the state’s Department of Water Resources. California is the only western state that opted to maintain its own snow survey program and run its own permanent monitoring stations, all of which are managed by the water department.  The plan is to determine which instruments held up and functioned best this winter. Then, they can begin testing the most promising approaches at several additional sites next season. Eventually, the goal is to attach the devices at more than 100 of California’s snow monitoring stations, says Andrew Schwartz, the director of the lab. The NRCS is conducting a similar research effort at select SNOTEL sites equipped with a beaded temperature cable. One such cable is visible at the Heavenly SNOTEL station, next to where McEvoy and Bingham dug their snow pit, strung vertically between an arm extended from the main tower and the snow-covered ground.  DRI's Bjoern Bingham feeds the snow temperature profiler, an infrared device, down a hole in the Sierra snowpack.JAMES TEMPLE Schwartz said that the different research groups are communicating and collaborating openly on the projects, all of which promise to provide complementary information, expanding the database of snowpack temperature readings across the West. For decades, agencies and researchers generally produced water forecasts using relatively simple regression models that translated the amount of water in the snowpack into the amount of water that will flow down the mountain, based largely on the historic relationships between those variables.  But these models are becoming less reliable as climate change alters temperatures, snow levels, melt rates, and evaporation, and otherwise drives alpine weather patterns outside of historic patterns. “As we have years that scatter further and more frequently from the norm, our models aren’t prepared,” Heggli says. Plugging direct temperature observations into more sophisticated models that have emerged in recent years, Schwartz says, promises to significantly improve the accuracy of water forecasts. That, in turn, should help communities manage through droughts and prevent dams from overtopping even as climate change fuels alternately wetter, drier, warmer, and weirder weather. About a quarter of the world’s population relies on water stored in mountain snow and glaciers, and climate change is disrupting the hydrological cycles that sustain these natural frozen reservoirs in many parts of the world. So any advances in observations and modeling could deliver broader global benefits. Ominous weather There’s an obvious threat to this progress, though. Even if these projects work as well as hoped, it’s not clear how widely these tools and techniques will be deployed at a time when the White House is gutting staff across federal agencies, terminating thousands of scientific grants, and striving to eliminate tens of billions of dollars in funding at research departments.  The Trump administration has fired or put on administrative leave nearly 6,000 employees across the USDA, or 6% of the department’s workforce. Those cutbacks have reached regional NRCS offices, according to reporting by local and trade outlets. That includes more than half of the roles at the Portland office, according to O’Neill, the state climatologist. Those reductions prompted a bipartisan group of legislators to call on the Secretary of Agriculture to restore the positions, warning the losses could impair water data and analyses that are crucial for the state’s “agriculture, wildland fire, hydropower, timber, and tourism sectors,” as the Statesman Journal reported. There are more than 80 active SNOTEL stations in Oregon. The fear is there won’t be enough people left to reach all the sites this summer to replace batteries, solar panels, and drifting or broken sensors, which could quickly undermine the reliability of the data or cut off the flow of information.  “Staff and budget reductions at NRCS will make it impossible to maintain SNOTEL instruments and conduct routine manual observations, leading to inoperability of the network within a year,” the lawmakers warned. The USDA and NRCS didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review.  DRI’s Daniel McEvoy scribbles down temperature readings at the Heavenly site.JAMES TEMPLE If the federal cutbacks deplete the data coming back from SNOTEL stations or federal snow survey work, the DRI infrared method could at least “still offer a simplistic way of measuring the snowpack temperatures” in places where state and regional agencies continue to carry out surveys, McAvoy says. But most researchers stress the field needs more surveys, stations, sensors, and readings to understand how the climate and water cycles are changing from month to month and season to season. Heggli stresses that there should be broad bipartisan support for programs that collect snowpack data and provide the water forecasts that farmers and communities rely on.  “This is how we account for one of, if not the, most valuable resource we have,” she says. “In the West, we go into a seasonal drought every summer; our snowpack is what trickles down and gets us through that drought. We need to know how much we have.”

On a crisp morning in early April, Dan McEvoy and Bjoern Bingham cut clean lines down a wide run at the Heavenly Ski Resort in South Lake Tahoe, then ducked under a rope line cordoning off a patch of untouched snow.  They side-stepped up a small incline, poled past a row of Jeffrey pines, then dropped their packs.  The pair of climate researchers from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada, skied down to this research plot in the middle of the resort to test out a new way to take the temperature of the Sierra Nevada snowpack. They were equipped with an experimental infrared device that can take readings as it’s lowered down a hole in the snow to the ground. The Sierra’s frozen reservoir provides about a third of California’s water and most of what comes out of the faucets, shower heads, and sprinklers in the towns and cities of northwestern Nevada. As it melts through the spring and summer, dam operators, water agencies, and communities have to manage the flow of billions of gallons of runoff, storing up enough to get through the inevitable dry summer months without allowing reservoirs and canals to flood. The need for better snowpack temperature data has become increasingly critical for predicting when the water will flow down the mountains, as climate change fuels hotter weather, melts snow faster, and drives rapid swings between very wet and very dry periods.  In the past, it has been arduous work to gather such snowpack observations. Now, a new generation of tools, techniques, and models promises to ease that process, improve water forecasts, and help California and other states safely manage one of their largest sources of water in the face of increasingly severe droughts and flooding. Observers, however, fear that any such advances could be undercut by the Trump administration’s cutbacks across federal agencies, including the one that oversees federal snowpack monitoring and survey work. That could jeopardize ongoing efforts to produce the water data and forecasts on which Western communities rely. “If we don’t have those measurements, it’s like driving your car around without a fuel gauge,” says Larry O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist. “We won’t know how much water is up in the mountains, and whether there’s enough to last through the summer.” The birth of snow surveys The snow survey program in the US was born near Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America, around the turn of the 20th century.  Without any reliable way of knowing how much water would flow down the mountain each spring, lakefront home and business owners, fearing floods, implored dam operators to release water early in the spring. Downstream communities and farmers pushed back, however, demanding that the dam was used to hold onto as much water as possible to avoid shortages later in the year.  In 1908, James Church, a classics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, whose passion for hiking around the mountains sparked an interest in the science of snow, invented a device that helped resolve the so-called Lake Tahoe Water Wars: the Mt. Rose snow sampler, named after the peak of a Sierra spur that juts into Nevada. James Church, a professor of classics at the University of Nevada, Reno, became a pioneer in the field of snow surveys.COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO It’s a simple enough device, with sections of tube that screw together, a sharpened end, and measurement ticks along the side. Snow surveyors measure the depth of the snow by plunging the sampler down to the ground. They then weigh the filled tube on a specialized scale to calculate the water content of the snow.  Church used the device to take measurements at various points across the range, and calibrated his water forecasts by comparing his readings against the rising and falling levels of Lake Tahoe.  It worked so well that the US began a federal snow survey program in the mid-1930s, which evolved into the one carried on today by the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Throughout the winter, hundreds of snow surveyors across the American West head up to established locations on snowshoes, backcountry skis, or snowmobiles to deploy their Mt. Rose samplers, which have barely changed over more than a century.  In the 1960s, the US government also began setting up a network of permanent monitoring sites across the mountains, now known as the SNOTEL network. There are more than 900 stations continuously transmitting readings from across Western states and Alaska. They’re equipped with sensors that measure air temperature, snow depth, and soil moisture, and include pressure-sensitive “snow pillows” that weigh the snow to determine the water content.  The data from the snow surveys and SNOTEL sites all flows into snow depth and snow water content reports that the NRCS publishes, along with forecasts of the amount of water that will fill the streams and reservoirs through the spring and summer. Taking the temperature None of these survey and monitoring programs, however, provide the temperature throughout the snowpack.  The Sierra Nevada snowpack can reach more than 6 meters (20 feet), and the temperature within it may vary widely, especially toward the top. Readings taken at increments throughout can determine what’s known as the cold content, or the amount of energy required to shift the snowpack to a uniform temperature of 32˚F.  Knowing the cold content of the snowpack helps researchers understand the conditions under which it will begin to rapidly melt, particularly as it warms up in the spring or after rain falls on top of the snow. If the temperature of the snow, for example, is close to 32˚F even at several feet deep, a few warm days could easily set it melting. If, on the other hand, the temperature measurements show a colder profile throughout the middle, the snowpack is more stable and will hold up longer as the weather warms. Bjoern Bingham, a research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, digs at snowpit at a research plot within the Heavenly Ski Resort, near South Lake Tahoe, California. JAMES TEMPLE The problem is that taking the temperature of the entire snowpack has been, until now, tough and time-consuming work. When researchers do it at all, they mainly do so by digging snow pits down to the ground and then taking readings with probe thermometers along an inside wall. There have been a variety of efforts to take continuous remote readings from sensors attached to fences, wires, or towers, which the snowpack eventually buries. But the movement and weight of the dense shifting snow tends to break the devices or snap the structures they’re assembled upon.“They rarely last a season,” McAvoy says. Anne Heggli, a professor of mountain hydrometeorology at DRI, happened upon the idea of using an infrared device to solve this problem during a tour of the institute’s campus in 2019, when she learned that researchers there were using an infrared meat thermometer to take contactless readings of the snow surface. In 2021, Heggli began collaborating with RPM Systems, a gadget manufacturing company, to design an infrared device optimized for snowpack field conditions. The resulting snow temperature profiler is skinny enough to fit down a hole dug by snow surveyors and dangles on a cord marked off at 10-centimeter (4-inch) increments. Bingham and Daniel McEvoy, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute, work together to take temperature readings from inside the snowpit as well as from within the hole left behind by a snow sampler.JAMES TEMPLE At Heavenly on that April morning, Bingham, a staff scientist at DRI, slowly fed the device down a snow sampler hole, calling out temperature readings at each marking. McEvoy scribbled them down on a worksheet fastened to his clipboard as he used a probe thermometer to take readings of his own from within a snow pit the pair had dug down to the ground. They were comparing the measurements to assess the reliability of the infrared device in the field, but the eventual aim is to eliminate the need to dig snow pits. The hope is that state and federal surveyors could simply carry along a snow temperature profiler and drop it into the snowpack survey holes they’re creating anyway, to gather regular snowpack temperature readings from across the mountains. In 2023, the US Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that operates many of the nation’s dams, funded a three-year research project to explore the use of the infrared gadgets in determining snowpack temperatures. Through it, the DRI research team has now handed devices out to 20 snow survey teams across California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah to test their use in the field and supplement the snowpack data they’re collecting. The Snow Lab The DRI research project is one piece of a wider effort to obtain snowpack temperature data across the mountains of the West. By early May, the snow depth had dropped from an April peak of 114 inches to 24 inches (2.9 meters to 0.6 meters) at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab, an aging wooden structure perched in the high mountains northwest of Lake Tahoe. Megan Mason, a research scientist at the lab, used a backcountry ski shovel to dig out a trio of instruments from what was left of the pitted snowpack behind the building. Each one featured different types of temperature sensors, arrayed along a strong polymer beam meant to hold up under the weight and movement of the Sierra snowpack.  She was pulling up the devices after running the last set of observations for the season, as part of an effort to develop a resilient system that can survive the winter and transmit hourly temperature readings. The lab is working on the project, dubbed the California Cold Content Initiative, in collaboration with the state’s Department of Water Resources. California is the only western state that opted to maintain its own snow survey program and run its own permanent monitoring stations, all of which are managed by the water department.  The plan is to determine which instruments held up and functioned best this winter. Then, they can begin testing the most promising approaches at several additional sites next season. Eventually, the goal is to attach the devices at more than 100 of California’s snow monitoring stations, says Andrew Schwartz, the director of the lab. The NRCS is conducting a similar research effort at select SNOTEL sites equipped with a beaded temperature cable. One such cable is visible at the Heavenly SNOTEL station, next to where McEvoy and Bingham dug their snow pit, strung vertically between an arm extended from the main tower and the snow-covered ground.  DRI's Bjoern Bingham feeds the snow temperature profiler, an infrared device, down a hole in the Sierra snowpack.JAMES TEMPLE Schwartz said that the different research groups are communicating and collaborating openly on the projects, all of which promise to provide complementary information, expanding the database of snowpack temperature readings across the West. For decades, agencies and researchers generally produced water forecasts using relatively simple regression models that translated the amount of water in the snowpack into the amount of water that will flow down the mountain, based largely on the historic relationships between those variables.  But these models are becoming less reliable as climate change alters temperatures, snow levels, melt rates, and evaporation, and otherwise drives alpine weather patterns outside of historic patterns. “As we have years that scatter further and more frequently from the norm, our models aren’t prepared,” Heggli says. Plugging direct temperature observations into more sophisticated models that have emerged in recent years, Schwartz says, promises to significantly improve the accuracy of water forecasts. That, in turn, should help communities manage through droughts and prevent dams from overtopping even as climate change fuels alternately wetter, drier, warmer, and weirder weather. About a quarter of the world’s population relies on water stored in mountain snow and glaciers, and climate change is disrupting the hydrological cycles that sustain these natural frozen reservoirs in many parts of the world. So any advances in observations and modeling could deliver broader global benefits. Ominous weather There’s an obvious threat to this progress, though. Even if these projects work as well as hoped, it’s not clear how widely these tools and techniques will be deployed at a time when the White House is gutting staff across federal agencies, terminating thousands of scientific grants, and striving to eliminate tens of billions of dollars in funding at research departments.  The Trump administration has fired or put on administrative leave nearly 6,000 employees across the USDA, or 6% of the department’s workforce. Those cutbacks have reached regional NRCS offices, according to reporting by local and trade outlets. That includes more than half of the roles at the Portland office, according to O’Neill, the state climatologist. Those reductions prompted a bipartisan group of legislators to call on the Secretary of Agriculture to restore the positions, warning the losses could impair water data and analyses that are crucial for the state’s “agriculture, wildland fire, hydropower, timber, and tourism sectors,” as the Statesman Journal reported. There are more than 80 active SNOTEL stations in Oregon. The fear is there won’t be enough people left to reach all the sites this summer to replace batteries, solar panels, and drifting or broken sensors, which could quickly undermine the reliability of the data or cut off the flow of information.  “Staff and budget reductions at NRCS will make it impossible to maintain SNOTEL instruments and conduct routine manual observations, leading to inoperability of the network within a year,” the lawmakers warned. The USDA and NRCS didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review.  DRI’s Daniel McEvoy scribbles down temperature readings at the Heavenly site.JAMES TEMPLE If the federal cutbacks deplete the data coming back from SNOTEL stations or federal snow survey work, the DRI infrared method could at least “still offer a simplistic way of measuring the snowpack temperatures” in places where state and regional agencies continue to carry out surveys, McAvoy says. But most researchers stress the field needs more surveys, stations, sensors, and readings to understand how the climate and water cycles are changing from month to month and season to season. Heggli stresses that there should be broad bipartisan support for programs that collect snowpack data and provide the water forecasts that farmers and communities rely on.  “This is how we account for one of, if not the, most valuable resource we have,” she says. “In the West, we go into a seasonal drought every summer; our snowpack is what trickles down and gets us through that drought. We need to know how much we have.”

On a crisp morning in early April, Dan McEvoy and Bjoern Bingham cut clean lines down a wide run at the Heavenly Ski Resort in South Lake Tahoe, then ducked under a rope line cordoning off a patch of untouched snow.  They side-stepped up a small incline, poled past a row of Jeffrey pines, then dropped their packs.  The pair of climate researchers from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada, skied down to this research plot in the middle of the resort to test out a new way to take the temperature of the Sierra Nevada snowpack. They were equipped with an experimental infrared device that can take readings as it’s lowered down a hole in the snow to the ground. The Sierra’s frozen reservoir provides about a third of California’s water and most of what comes out of the faucets, shower heads, and sprinklers in the towns and cities of northwestern Nevada. As it melts through the spring and summer, dam operators, water agencies, and communities have to manage the flow of billions of gallons of runoff, storing up enough to get through the inevitable dry summer months without allowing reservoirs and canals to flood. The need for better snowpack temperature data has become increasingly critical for predicting when the water will flow down the mountains, as climate change fuels hotter weather, melts snow faster, and drives rapid swings between very wet and very dry periods.  In the past, it has been arduous work to gather such snowpack observations. Now, a new generation of tools, techniques, and models promises to ease that process, improve water forecasts, and help California and other states safely manage one of their largest sources of water in the face of increasingly severe droughts and flooding.Observers, however, fear that any such advances could be undercut by the Trump administration’s cutbacks across federal agencies, including the one that oversees federal snowpack monitoring and survey work. That could jeopardize ongoing efforts to produce the water data and forecasts on which Western communities rely. “If we don’t have those measurements, it’s like driving your car around without a fuel gauge,” says Larry O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist. “We won’t know how much water is up in the mountains, and whether there’s enough to last through the summer.” The birth of snow surveys The snow survey program in the US was born near Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America, around the turn of the 20th century.  Without any reliable way of knowing how much water would flow down the mountain each spring, lakefront home and business owners, fearing floods, implored dam operators to release water early in the spring. Downstream communities and farmers pushed back, however, demanding that the dam was used to hold onto as much water as possible to avoid shortages later in the year.  In 1908, James Church, a classics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, whose passion for hiking around the mountains sparked an interest in the science of snow, invented a device that helped resolve the so-called Lake Tahoe Water Wars: the Mt. Rose snow sampler, named after the peak of a Sierra spur that juts into Nevada. James Church, a professor of classics at the University of Nevada, Reno, became a pioneer in the field of snow surveys.COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO It’s a simple enough device, with sections of tube that screw together, a sharpened end, and measurement ticks along the side. Snow surveyors measure the depth of the snow by plunging the sampler down to the ground. They then weigh the filled tube on a specialized scale to calculate the water content of the snow.  Church used the device to take measurements at various points across the range, and calibrated his water forecasts by comparing his readings against the rising and falling levels of Lake Tahoe.  It worked so well that the US began a federal snow survey program in the mid-1930s, which evolved into the one carried on today by the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Throughout the winter, hundreds of snow surveyors across the American West head up to established locations on snowshoes, backcountry skis, or snowmobiles to deploy their Mt. Rose samplers, which have barely changed over more than a century.  In the 1960s, the US government also began setting up a network of permanent monitoring sites across the mountains, now known as the SNOTEL network. There are more than 900 stations continuously transmitting readings from across Western states and Alaska. They’re equipped with sensors that measure air temperature, snow depth, and soil moisture, and include pressure-sensitive “snow pillows” that weigh the snow to determine the water content.  The data from the snow surveys and SNOTEL sites all flows into snow depth and snow water content reports that the NRCS publishes, along with forecasts of the amount of water that will fill the streams and reservoirs through the spring and summer. Taking the temperature None of these survey and monitoring programs, however, provide the temperature throughout the snowpack.  The Sierra Nevada snowpack can reach more than 6 meters (20 feet), and the temperature within it may vary widely, especially toward the top. Readings taken at increments throughout can determine what’s known as the cold content, or the amount of energy required to shift the snowpack to a uniform temperature of 32˚F.  Knowing the cold content of the snowpack helps researchers understand the conditions under which it will begin to rapidly melt, particularly as it warms up in the spring or after rain falls on top of the snow. If the temperature of the snow, for example, is close to 32˚F even at several feet deep, a few warm days could easily set it melting. If, on the other hand, the temperature measurements show a colder profile throughout the middle, the snowpack is more stable and will hold up longer as the weather warms. Bjoern Bingham, a research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, digs at snowpit at a research plot within the Heavenly Ski Resort, near South Lake Tahoe, California. JAMES TEMPLE The problem is that taking the temperature of the entire snowpack has been, until now, tough and time-consuming work. When researchers do it at all, they mainly do so by digging snow pits down to the ground and then taking readings with probe thermometers along an inside wall.There have been a variety of efforts to take continuous remote readings from sensors attached to fences, wires, or towers, which the snowpack eventually buries. But the movement and weight of the dense shifting snow tends to break the devices or snap the structures they’re assembled upon. “They rarely last a season,” McAvoy says. Anne Heggli, a professor of mountain hydrometeorology at DRI, happened upon the idea of using an infrared device to solve this problem during a tour of the institute’s campus in 2019, when she learned that researchers there were using an infrared meat thermometer to take contactless readings of the snow surface. In 2021, Heggli began collaborating with RPM Systems, a gadget manufacturing company, to design an infrared device optimized for snowpack field conditions. The resulting snow temperature profiler is skinny enough to fit down a hole dug by snow surveyors and dangles on a cord marked off at 10-centimeter (4-inch) increments. Bingham and Daniel McEvoy, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute, work together to take temperature readings from inside the snowpit as well as from within the hole left behind by a snow sampler.JAMES TEMPLE At Heavenly on that April morning, Bingham, a staff scientist at DRI, slowly fed the device down a snow sampler hole, calling out temperature readings at each marking. McEvoy scribbled them down on a worksheet fastened to his clipboard as he used a probe thermometer to take readings of his own from within a snow pit the pair had dug down to the ground. They were comparing the measurements to assess the reliability of the infrared device in the field, but the eventual aim is to eliminate the need to dig snow pits. The hope is that state and federal surveyors could simply carry along a snow temperature profiler and drop it into the snowpack survey holes they’re creating anyway, to gather regular snowpack temperature readings from across the mountains. In 2023, the US Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that operates many of the nation’s dams, funded a three-year research project to explore the use of the infrared gadgets in determining snowpack temperatures. Through it, the DRI research team has now handed devices out to 20 snow survey teams across California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah to test their use in the field and supplement the snowpack data they’re collecting. The Snow Lab The DRI research project is one piece of a wider effort to obtain snowpack temperature data across the mountains of the West. By early May, the snow depth had dropped from an April peak of 114 inches to 24 inches (2.9 meters to 0.6 meters) at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab, an aging wooden structure perched in the high mountains northwest of Lake Tahoe.Megan Mason, a research scientist at the lab, used a backcountry ski shovel to dig out a trio of instruments from what was left of the pitted snowpack behind the building. Each one featured different types of temperature sensors, arrayed along a strong polymer beam meant to hold up under the weight and movement of the Sierra snowpack.   She was pulling up the devices after running the last set of observations for the season, as part of an effort to develop a resilient system that can survive the winter and transmit hourly temperature readings. The lab is working on the project, dubbed the California Cold Content Initiative, in collaboration with the state’s Department of Water Resources. California is the only western state that opted to maintain its own snow survey program and run its own permanent monitoring stations, all of which are managed by the water department.  The plan is to determine which instruments held up and functioned best this winter. Then, they can begin testing the most promising approaches at several additional sites next season. Eventually, the goal is to attach the devices at more than 100 of California’s snow monitoring stations, says Andrew Schwartz, the director of the lab.The NRCS is conducting a similar research effort at select SNOTEL sites equipped with a beaded temperature cable. One such cable is visible at the Heavenly SNOTEL station, next to where McEvoy and Bingham dug their snow pit, strung vertically between an arm extended from the main tower and the snow-covered ground.  DRI’s Bjoern Bingham feeds the snow temperature profiler, an infrared device, down a hole in the Sierra snowpack.JAMES TEMPLE Schwartz said that the different research groups are communicating and collaborating openly on the projects, all of which promise to provide complementary information, expanding the database of snowpack temperature readings across the West. For decades, agencies and researchers generally produced water forecasts using relatively simple regression models that translated the amount of water in the snowpack into the amount of water that will flow down the mountain, based largely on the historic relationships between those variables.  But these models are becoming less reliable as climate change alters temperatures, snow levels, melt rates, and evaporation, and otherwise drives alpine weather patterns outside of historic patterns. “As we have years that scatter further and more frequently from the norm, our models aren’t prepared,” Heggli says. Plugging direct temperature observations into more sophisticated models that have emerged in recent years, Schwartz says, promises to significantly improve the accuracy of water forecasts. That, in turn, should help communities manage through droughts and prevent dams from overtopping even as climate change fuels alternately wetter, drier, warmer, and weirder weather. About a quarter of the world’s population relies on water stored in mountain snow and glaciers, and climate change is disrupting the hydrological cycles that sustain these natural frozen reservoirs in many parts of the world. So any advances in observations and modeling could deliver broader global benefits. Ominous weather There’s an obvious threat to this progress, though. Even if these projects work as well as hoped, it’s not clear how widely these tools and techniques will be deployed at a time when the White House is gutting staff across federal agencies, terminating thousands of scientific grants, and striving to eliminate tens of billions of dollars in funding at research departments.  The Trump administration has fired or put on administrative leave nearly 6,000 employees across the USDA, or 6% of the department’s workforce. Those cutbacks have reached regional NRCS offices, according to reporting by local and trade outlets. That includes more than half of the roles at the Portland office, according to O’Neill, the state climatologist. Those reductions prompted a bipartisan group of legislators to call on the Secretary of Agriculture to restore the positions, warning the losses could impair water data and analyses that are crucial for the state’s “agriculture, wildland fire, hydropower, timber, and tourism sectors,” as the Statesman Journal reported. There are more than 80 active SNOTEL stations in Oregon. The fear is there won’t be enough people left to reach all the sites this summer to replace batteries, solar panels, and drifting or broken sensors, which could quickly undermine the reliability of the data or cut off the flow of information.  “Staff and budget reductions at NRCS will make it impossible to maintain SNOTEL instruments and conduct routine manual observations, leading to inoperability of the network within a year,” the lawmakers warned. The USDA and NRCS didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review.  DRI’s Daniel McEvoy scribbles down temperature readings at the Heavenly site.JAMES TEMPLE If the federal cutbacks deplete the data coming back from SNOTEL stations or federal snow survey work, the DRI infrared method could at least “still offer a simplistic way of measuring the snowpack temperatures” in places where state and regional agencies continue to carry out surveys, McAvoy says. But most researchers stress the field needs more surveys, stations, sensors, and readings to understand how the climate and water cycles are changing from month to month and season to season. Heggli stresses that there should be broad bipartisan support for programs that collect snowpack data and provide the water forecasts that farmers and communities rely on.  “This is how we account for one of, if not the, most valuable resource we have,” she says. “In the West, we go into a seasonal drought every summer; our snowpack is what trickles down and gets us through that drought. We need to know how much we have.”

The International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia,  has returned, with its grand opening held in early May. The exhibition runs until November 23, 2025 The Canada Council for the Arts, Commissioner of Canada’s official participation in the International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, administers the selection process and oversees the exhibition at the Canada Pavilion. But in addition to the Canada Pavilion, Canadian architects and designers have a presence in several other exhibitions that are part of this year’s festival. Here’s a round-up of the Canadian work in Venice. Picoplanktonics. Photo credit: Valentina Mori Picoplanktonics led by Living Room Collective Canada’s official entry to the Biennale is Picoplanktonics, a 3D-printed living artwork incorporating cyanobacteria—a global first at the intersection of architecture, biotechnology, and art. The exhibition, developed by the Living Room Collective, showcases the potential for collaboration between humans and nature. Picoplanktonics is an exploration of the potential to co-operate with living systems by co-constructing spaces that “remediate the planet rather than exploit it.” The installation transforms the Canada Pavilion into an aquatic micro-ecosystem, where architectural structures grow, evolve, and naturally degrade alongside their living components. It was designed according to regenerative architecture principles, and is not only a built object, but also a breathing organism interacting with its environment, which prompts reflection on potential futures of the built environment. The creative team is led by bio-designer Andrea Shin Ling, alongside core team members Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui and Clayton Lee. Etude Ile Verte by Atelier Pierre Thibault. Photo credit Alex Lesage Les boucaneries de l’île Verte by Atelier Pierre Thibault Atelier Pierre Thibault has been invited to participate in this year’s Venice Biennale as the only team from Québec. His project is inspired by the old fish smokehouses, or boucaneries, of Île Verte. With the support of the fifty permanent residents of Île Verte, Atelier Pierre Thibault has designed a participatory architectural project that aims to reinterpret the boucaneries as creative canvases to imagine new uses to strengthen Île Verte’s autonomy. This includes community greenhouses, artist studios, and gathering places. The exhibition aims to highlight, as Thibault puts it, “the strength of a sensitive and collective gesture in response to the erosion of traditional buildings and the major climate challenges faced by inhabitants living year-round in an isolated island environment.” The construction of the installations, along with the exchanges sparked with the community, was documented through photography and video, and captures both the process and the spirit of collaboration that defined the project. Celebrating the Verdoyants’ collective intelligence and inviting reflection on the future of the boucaneries, this participatory project highlights the exemplary and internationally resonant nature of this approach. The Atelier Pierre Thibault project will be on view at the Corderie dell’Arsenale. The pavilion itself will take the form of a temporary, lightweight structure constructed from reused materials, situated on the grounds of the French Pavilion, which is currently undergoing renovation. The curators have selected 50 projects to be featured across six thematic sections: Living With the Existing, the Immediate, the Broken, Vulnerabilities, Nature, and Combined Intelligences. Image courtesy of WZMH Architects Speedstac by WZMH Architects as part of Living With…Combined Intelligences  As part of the exhibition “Living With… Combined Intelligences,” WZMH Architects presents Speedstac, a prefabricated modular precast solution that aims to reimagine how urban areas devastated by war can be rebuilt. Originally designed to accelerate housing construction in Canada, Speedstac took on urgent new relevance following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With more than 170,000 buildings damaged or destroyed and millions displaced, WZMH’s innovation, developed through its R&D lab, sparkbird, aims to offer a scalable solution: self-contained, plug-and-play building modules with integrated electrical and plumbing systems that can be seamlessly inserted into existing structures. The use of modern materials such as high-performance concrete can reduce the weight of the modules, making them easier to lift and move using conventional crane equipment. Using a robust locking mechanism, several modules can be securely fastened and unfastened as needed, to produce an adaptive modular housing solution. The Speedstac system aims to offer a solution to the challenges of traditional construction methods, enabling faster, more flexible, and more sustainable building projects. The Vivre Avec / Living With exhibition is hosted in the French Pavilion. Presentation, Northern Horizons. Photo credit: Blouin Orzes architectes Northern Horizons by Blouin Orzes architectes as part of Time Space Existence  Through a wide selection of projects—ranging from conceptual works, models and photographs to videos, sculptures and site-specific installations—the exhibition Time Space Existence, hosted by the European Cultural Centre, aims to provoke participants to question their relationship with space and time, re-envisioning new ways of living and rethinking architecture through a larger lens. Quebec firm Blouin Orzes’ participation revolves around their first-hand understanding of Inuit territories, where they have been working since 2000. Their contribution is based on their  recent publication, Northern Journeys. Blouin Orzes’ contribution in on display at the Palazzo Mora, and additional contributions to Time Space Existence are on view at the Palazzo Bembo and Marinaressa Gardens. View of Commercial and Residential Towers from Seymour and West Georgia Streets. Image credit: Henriquez Partners Studio BC Glass Sea Sponge Another contribution to Time Space Existence is the work of Henriquez Partners Studio. The transformative mixed-use development which they are presenting merges architectural innovation, social responsibility and urban revitalization, and has recently been submitted to the City of Vancouver. The project is about ambitious city-building, and aims to unlock public benefits on currently underutilized land in a way that supports some of the city’s most urgent needs, while contributing bold architecture to the city skyline. Four towers, designed by Henriquez, draw inspiration from rare and ancient glass sea sponge reefs, whose ecological strength and resilience have shaped both form and structure. These living marine organisms, which are unique to the Pacific Northwest, aim to serve as a metaphor for regeneration and adaptation. This concept is translated through the architectural language of the towers: silhouettes, sculptural forms, and sustainable performance. The tallest tower, a stand-alone hotel, proposed at 1,033 feet, is shaped by a structural diagrid exoskeleton that allows for column-free interiors while maximizing strength and minimizing material use. Developed in collaboration with Arup, the structural system references the skeletal lattice of sea sponges; a concept researched at Harvard for its groundbreaking structural efficiency. Henriquez Partners’  contribution is on display at Palazzo Bembo. Renewal Development Shishalh Project Duplex Renderings – Image credit: Renewal Development Shíshálh Nation: Ten Home Rescue Project as part of theLiving With / Vivre avec exhibition Vancouver-based company Renewal Development has been selected to appear as part of the French Pavilion’s exhibition on housing innovation. In 2024, Renewal Development partnered with developer Wesgroup and the shíshálh Nation to relocate ten high value Port Moody homes set for demolition to the shíshálh Nation on the Sunshine Coast. The Nation has been experiencing an acute housing shortage with 900 Nation members currently on a waitlist for housing. Renewal Development says that this initiative reflects its “deeply held values of sustainability, and reconciliation” and its “work to offer real-world solutions to waste and housing shortages by reimagining what already exists.” The project will be on display in the French Pavilion. The following is a list of other Canadian groups and individuals contributing to this year’s Venice Biennale: On Storage Brendan Cormier is a Canadian writer, curator, and urban designer based in London. He is currently the lead curator of 20th and 21st Century Design for the Shekou Partnership at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Prior to this he served as the managing editor of Volume Magazine. La Biennale di Venezia and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London present for the ninth consecutive year the Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project titled On Storage, curated by Brendan Cormier, in collaboration with Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R). It explores the global architecture of storage in service of the circulation of things, and features a newly commissioned six-channel film directed by DS+R. From Liquid to Stone: A Reconfigurable Concrete Tectonic Against Obsolescence Inge Donovan, based in Boston, achieved her Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Design and Architectural History, Theory and Criticism from the Daniels Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto in 2019 after growing up in Nova Scotia, Canada. The Curse of Dimensionality Adeline Chum is currently a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Spatial Research and third-year student in the MArch Program at GSAPP. She has received her Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo, Canada and has worked in small and medium-sized architecture firms in Toronto, New York, and London. Oceanic Refractions Elise Misao Hunchuck, born in Toronto and currently based Berlin and Milan, is a transdisciplinary researcher, editor, writer, and educator. Her practice brings together architecture, landscape architecture, and media studies to research sites in Canada, Japan, China, and Ukraine, employing text, images, and cartographies to document, explore, and archive the co-constitutive relationships between plants, animals, and minerals—in all of their forms. SpaceSuits.Us: A Case for Ultra Thin Adjustments Charles Kim is a designer currently based in Boston. Stemming from his background in architecture, he is interested in materials, DIY, and the aesthetics of affordability. Since graduating from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2022, he has been working as an architectural designer at Utile. Uncommon Knowledge: Plants as Sensors Sonia Sobrino Ralston is a designer, researcher, and educator, and is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor in Landscape Architecture and Art + Design at Northeastern University in the College of Arts, Media, and Design. She is interested in the intersections between landscape, architecture, and the history of technology. Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism Mark Wasiuta is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP and Co-Director of the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program. Wasiuta is recipient of recent grants from the Onassis Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, NYSCA, and the Graham Foundation, where he was an inaugural Graham Foundation Fellow. Blue Garden: The Architecture of Emergence Tanvi Khurmi, based in London, UK, is a multidisciplinary designer and artist. Her practice is focused on addressing and combatting issues surrounding the climate crisis. After receiving a Bachelor’s in Architecture with a minor in Environmental Studies from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto, she earned a Masters of Architecture in Bio-Integrated Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. Design as an Astronaut Dr. Cody Paige is the Director of the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, a team of 50+ students, faculty, and staff building and flying advanced technology for space exploration. The Initiative focuses on helping students take their research into space. The pipeline developed to achieve this works with students from across the Media Lab and the MIT community to prototype space-related research in the lab, fly and test them in microgravity on parabolic and suborbital flights, and finally to take them to the International Space Station or on to the Moon. Cody also has a background in geology, specifically quaternary geochronology, and completed her Master of Applied Science at the University of Toronto in Aerospace Engineering and her Bachelor of Applied Science from Queen’s University in Engineering Physics.   The post Round-up: Canadian-led exhibitions at the 2025 Venice Biennale appeared first on Canadian Architect.