A researcher studying the impacts on water and catastrophic debris flows on Mount Hood says there remain still more questions to be answered.

Hydroclimatologist and geographer Anne Nolin, of Oregon State University, spoke about her research to a room packed full of people Jan. 22 in Hood River. The talk was part of the monthly meeting of the Hood River Watershed Group.

Nolin and her graduate assistant, Jeff Phillippe, have been looking at the shrinking of the Eliot and Coe glaciers. They would have looked at Newton and Clark glaciers as well but limited funding from the U.S. Geological Survey kept them from doing so.

She said the general trend in the Pacific Northwest is that winters have been getting warmer with a shift from snowfall to rainfall. Part of the impetus locally for understanding what is happening is the needs of agriculture in the upper Hood River Valley that depend on glacial melt water.

“So one of the questions we asked was ‘Do glaciers really influence basin-scale drainage on a smaller scale?’” Nolin said.

“On a smaller scale, where irrigation districts take out their water, it could.”

The OSU study focused on the Eliot and Coe catchments on the north side of Mount Hood. Nolin used in her presentation many pictures by White Salmon landscape photographer Darryl Lloyd. A number of those were combined with historical photos by H.F. Reid to overlay the present-day situation with years past. This presented a then and now effect of the glacier’s visual measurement from several different geographic vantage points.

Nolin said they think what happened with the storm of November 2006 — which wreaked havoc on Hood River County, especially on Middle Fork and Farmers irrigation districts — was that a Pineapple Express storm combined with already-existing receding conditions created the sloughing off of tons of debris.

She said they think what happens with the role of receding glaciers is that ice buttresses the sides of a valley but the erosion creates a valley-style shape with some ice remaining along the sides but not the bottom, which creates a chute of sorts.

“The glacier recedes; and add water to that and what you get is what happened in that storm,” she said.

Nolin showed weather slides from November 2006 which revealed a Pineapple Express that came off typhoons in the Sea of Japan. One slide showed a definite plume twisting off by itself from the weather system and heading straight for the Pacific Northwest.

“With that storm it was raining almost all the way to the top of Mount Hood,” she said.

That brought more questions forward for her research including what the conditions of the local area are before that type of event, which is impacted by water on top of the glacier but also water flowing underneath.

“We’re still not sure why it (Eliot) collapsed the way it did,” she said.

Generally, having snow on the moraine slows down rainwater. She said when that condition is present then there is not a debris flow. The question for her research came from the fact that historically there is less snow in the Mount Hood area than there used to be according to 50 years of data from Sno-tel sites, including one at Timberline lodge.

Additional answers should come from another study. Nolin said they had just received National Science Foundation monies for mapping to do a preliminary analysis of Hood and Rainier Lidar data. These are aerial photos and satellite imagery.

“It’s great to be a geographer now because of the nexus of these different areas,” Nolin said.

Following her presentation, Nolin answered many questions from the audience. Several of these included queries as to opposing theories regarding climate change and the more frequently used term of global warming.