HP Marshall

Hans-Peter (HP) Marshall lives in Boise, Idaho. He’s a professor of Geophysics within the Geosciences Department at Boise State University. He also co-directs the Cryosphere Geophysics and Remote Sensing (CryoGARS) group. His background in snow research started as an undergraduate in physics and geophysics at University of Washington (Go Huskies!), where he worked on rain-on-snow avalanches at Alpental, and glacier mass balance in the Olympics. He spent a year teaching high school students in a small Athabascan village in the Canadian Arctic, and then did graduate school in Civil Engineering at INSTAAR, CU Boulder, studying spatial variability of snow and its impact on avalanches and remote sensing. After finishing, he lived in Durango, Colorado, where he did radar field projects on Red Mountain Pass at the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies for five years before moving to Boise State. As of right now, he just finished co-leading the NASA SnowEx Mission, and he’s excited to find ways to integrate NASA’s SnowEx snow research program with CSO. HP has always chosen to focus on field-based snow science, and for a long time he was worried that working on remote sensing and modeling might force him to be in the office all of the time. “But”, he says, “the limiting factor for interpretation and accuracy of snow products from remote sensing and modeling always comes down to the available field observations for calibration and validation. As these new large scale tools continue to advance, rather than making field observations obsolete, it makes them even more important.”

HP is passionate about all ways of sliding on snow, increasing diversity in snow science, avalanches, radar remote sensing, snow physics, and having fun outside with his family and friends. Every day, he tries to remind himself about why he got into snow science in the first place – the wonderful community, field work (whether its an evening snowpit after work or a polar expedition), and the excitement what a new dataset might hold.

What is community science? Why join CSO?

HP is excited to be part of CSO and he thinks the community science approach is exactly what we need as we push towards global snow monitoring solutions.

Check out HP @cryogars (Instagram) and @snowradar (Twitter)