It's mid-March, and even if most of the snow has melted in southern and coastal Maine, on Saddleback Mountain it's very much still winter.
Snow is flying in the freezing air as a team of researchers trek about a mile onto the mountain, near Rangeley, cross a frozen pond and crunch through knee-deep snow to reach a monitoring site.
It's one of six sites set up this winter, and one of the few places in New England capturing snow depth on mountains higher than 2,500 feet.
Despite decades of snow monitoring records across the region, very little is known about the snowpack at higher mountain elevations, said Julia Daly, a geology professor at University of Maine Farmington.
That's left a critical information gap at a time when a warming climate is affecting winter recreation, cold-adapted ecosystems and flooding risks.
"It's hard to talk about the impact of climate change when you don't have any data to either establish a baseline or to capture that trend," Daly said.
The Saddleback site consists of two game cameras lashed to a tree facing opposite directions at measuring stakes in the snow. A buried sensor measures soil temperature and humidity.
"A challenge for a lot of our sites is that we are in a place with no power, no cell reception," said Rachel Hovel, an aquatic ecologist at UMaine Farmington.
The cameras are set up to take four photos a day. Daly and Hovel can analyze those images later to build a daily snowpack record.
Hovel said the aim is to try out more sophisticated equipment in the future, such as sensors that use gamma radiation to measure water content of the snow or sonar to look at snow depth.
"So we're trying to figure out exactly what instruments we're going to trial on these different sites," Hovel said.
Hovel and Daly plan to add more sites in the future. Monitoring mountain snow is helpful for water management, flood predictions and the winter recreation industry, Hovel said.
It can also help better identify "climate refugia" in Maine's mountains — areas that may be buffered to the worst effects of soaring global temperatures driven by burning fossil fuels.
"There are parts of the landscape that probably will continue to persist in these colder conditions for longer, and we're trying to better understand where those are and how we can better protect them," Hovel said.
For decades the America's mountain west has used SNOTEL, a coordinated network of remote monitoring sites that transmit regular data on snow depth, density, water content and weather.
"There are hundreds of these stations in the western U.S.," said Sarah Nelson, research director at the Appalachian Mountain Club.
"Because the western U.S. is different from the east, in that a lot of their water supply comes from mountain snowpack," Nelson added.
The Northeast is comparatively wet, with plenty of rivers, lakes and deep groundwater reservoirs.
Out of the 2,500 snow monitoring sites across the region, less than 3% are at high elevation, Nelson said. Just 6% transmit real-time data.
"Early on, there was not sort of that initial recognition that we might need to monitor the amount of snow we're getting here, or in the mountains particularly," Nelson said.
A group of researchers are now in the early stages of building the Northeast Snow Survey, a counterpart to SNOTEL.
The regional consortium is just completing its feasibility study, including widespread consultation the winter recreation industry, land managers and other stakeholders.
The effort has received federal funding and support from Maine Senators Susan Collins and Angus King and New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen.
The proposed network could help better understand how snowpack influences water supply, ecosystems, working lands and flooding, Nelson said.
Nelson said the data can also help the northeast prepare for destructive "rain on snow" events, such as a storm that dropped 5-7 inches of rain and melted early-season snow across Western Maine in December 2023, producing deadly flooding.
The state's existing snowpack monitoring usually starts in January, so forecasters didn't have measurements to make accurate flood predictions that early in the season, Nelson said. The proposed system could help address that information gap, Nelson added.
"Usually, we'd have snow and it would be cold and you wouldn't have to think 'what if we had an incredible melt event with rain in December?" Nelson said.
Beyond the importance of the information for safety, flooding, recreation and other issues, there's also a cultural element, said Hovel, the UMaine Farmington researcher.
New England has some of the fastest-warming winters in North America, and people recognize that's changing their traditional cold-weather activities, Hovel said. Collecting better data can help better understand what's happening and what we might expect in the future.
"Snow is an important way of life in this part of the world," Hovel said.
"A lot of culture and identity and the way we move across the landscape as humans is tied to having snowpack. And people are noticing that the experience is changing a lot."
