How we work

Flight and data acquisition

ASO Inc. flies scanning lidars and imaging spectrometers over mountain basins with optimized flight planning and real-time decision making for optimal retrievals.

Snow product generation

Using our exclusively licensed software, ASO Inc. converts scanning lidar and imaging spectrometer retrievals into snow depth, snow water equivalent, and snow albedo/reflectivity. These products are generated and delivered rapidly to users to assure timely utilization of the snowpack information.

snowpack and runoff modeling

ASO Inc. snow depth, SWE, and albedo are assimilated by the iSNOBAL snowpack model to update snowpack states. The snowpack modeling then uses energy-balance components to determine snowpack temperature, liquid water content, melt flux, and remaining snow mass in each 50 m grid cell. From these ASO Inc.-constrained modeling results, we can determine snowmelt runoff at daily to seasonal scales.