. >> tom painter is a snow scientist and director of snow optics lab. >> we are focused on understands the?"-water equivalent. >> how do you measure that? >> we developed the air snow observatory, the combination of a speck from at her to measure sunlight being absorbed by the snow pack and a scanning high frequent wednesday laser pointer that measures snow depth. the instruments look out this hole in the belly of the plane. the snow pack is a reservoir of water. it snows up there, stays up there until the spring, which is about the time that we're using it for agriculture, for municipal use, so there's this nice handoff of water so water can come out of the reservoir and be backfilled by the snow melt, and that information then is fed to water managers. it gives them an idea of the forecast for the coming weeks. >> the forecast isn't good. the lack of significant snowfall is just one issue scientists must deal with. the other is man made. >> dust and black carbon coming from industrialization accelerates snow melts in ways we haven't understood previously. >> here at the snow optics l