SEQUIM – NASA’s eyes in the sky are focused on the North Olympic Peninsula to help it manage its water.
The space agency won’t just help planners sort out the competing demands from farms, fish and people.
NASA also will ask the planners to find fresh tasks for its new satellites and new missions for its old spacecraft.
Already, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Sequim are using NASA satellite data to forecast much more accurately the snowmelt in the Olympic Mountains and its effects on the flow of the Dungeness River.
“We’re pretty pleased with some early results,” Mark Wigmosta, chief scientist in the Environmental Technology Division of the laboratory’s facilities in Richland, said Tuesday.
Wigmosta spoke during a tour of the laboratory’s Sequim headquarters by NASA’s E. Lucien Cox Jr., a program manager for the space agency based in Washington, D.C.
Cox had come to the Peninsula to monitor results of NASA’s $1.6 million grant to the North Olympic Peninsula Natural Resource Conservation and Development Council, which oversees both Clallam and Jefferson counties.