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.
The following has been edited for clarity and length.
The Colorado Sun: Why don’t we just start with: Who are you and what do you do?
Toby Minear: I’m a scientist studying rivers. As part of that work, I sometimes chase satellites — making ground measurements to validate the satellite. When you launch a satellite, particularly one like SWOT with many new instruments, there’s a bunch of things you need to make sure are correct before the data are released. It’s often not really clear if what you think is going to happen is actually what the satellite is measuring. So, in our case, we put up a satellite a year and a half ago and it has a new instrument designed to measure water surface widths and elevations. I check to see if the measurements are real or if there are artifacts or other things going on with the satellite.
Sun: What kind of water bodies are you measuring?
Minear: Mostly surface water bodies, so anything you can see with your eyes, and usually the bigger ones — the footprint of a house is usually the smallest size. We watch to see how much the volume of the body changes over time.
Sun: Are you looking at snowmelt?
Minear: SWOT can see snow, but we can make a more reliable measurement of the water surface elevation and its area when the water is liquid. Then we look at the relative change between, say, last week and this week or last year and this year, and that gives us the changes in water storage.
That’s useful because in Colorado, we have at least 3,000 water bodies that are big enough for SWOT to see, and virtually none of those have water gages on them, so no one knows their storage capacity. Rivers are the same. We have gages at a few locations, but in a lot of places we don’t. If you want to know what a water level is at different flows or during a flood, you can look at SWOT data now.
Sun: Ah-ha. So does your work help with water management?
Minear: Not yet, because it’s so new and people are just starting to work on it. So far, SWOT has been very much in the hands of engineers and scientists, and it has yet to make it into the water management side of things. Colorado has been thinking about using it to keep an eye on natural lakes and other water bodies. People might be surprised to know how few lakes and water bodies are measured — I would guess roughly 5% or less. When we show the SWOT data to water managers, they are often amazed because they realize how difficult it would be to instrument the millions of water bodies that SWOT observes.
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The biggest bang for the buck right now with SWOT is places that have no gages. We don’t really have many gages in South America or Africa or Greenland, for example. And we want to keep an eye on places like the Mekong River, where there are a bunch of dams being built and no one is passing on any information about them. There are many transboundary river problems — where a river crosses the border between two countries — that are going to be highlighted because of SWOT. If there’s a river that flows from one country into another and one country is holding back more water than is agreed on, for example.
Sun: You’re at CU but you’re partnering with NASA on this?
Minear: I just happen to be based in Boulder but I work with people all over the world. The satellite is built and run by NASA and partnered with space agencies from France, Canada and the U.K. Water is a globally important issue and many of these countries, the U.S. included, realize this, you know?
Sun: So what’s this about you getting to kayak to check your work?
Minear: Haha! Well, I only get to kayak rarely and typically only when the river is not deep enough for motorized boats. When the satellite is moving, it’s going very fast, like 24,000 kilometers an hour, and measuring over an area many hundreds of miles wide. To check the satellite measurements, we install water level equipment in a reach of river from 25 to 125 miles long that has relatively stable flow before the satellite goes overhead. When the satellite is overhead, we’ll do a run down the reach, typically in a motorized boat, with a high-grade GPS leveled to the water surface. To cover the largest amount of ground, we usually avoid kayaks but sometimes kayaks are needed when the river is very low or we need to go a short distance. Still, 25 miles in a kayak with a bunch of gear at low flow makes for very long days.
Sun: Is that you in the picture of the kayaker dropping a huge waterfall?
Minear: That’s me but it was 25 years ago!
Sun: Is boating for this job fun, too?
Minear: It is always nice to be on a river but it certainly feels much more like work than a recreational trip.