Ellen Abel walked in a circle just beyond the tennis courts outside of East Grand Forks Senior High School, poking a one-meter-long stick in the snow and reading aloud the results.
"Twenty-three ... 26 ... 30 ... 30 ... 31 ... 29 ... 23 ... 19," she said, as another student recorded the measurements.
Sydney Bowen followed the exercise by collecting snow to be melted indoors, where it will be measured for water content.
Abel, Bowen and their classmates will convert the metric readings to inches, and then come up with an average.
These students in Jill Thompson's advanced biology class also are checking for frost depth at one of two outdoor classrooms -- the other is at Thompson's farm, a few miles north of East Grand Forks.
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"We're doing this so we can maybe have a better prediction for the flood," Thompson said.
East Grand Forks is one of 15 high schools in northwest Minnesota that are part of the Red River Basin River Watch Snow Study Research Project, more commonly referred to as Snow Watch.
It's run by the International Water Institute, which studies flooding in the Red River Basin. This is the program's first year. It grew out of the institute's River Watch program, which provides hands-on science education for students in 34 schools in Minnesota, North Dakota and Manitoba.
Wayne Goeken, director of the institute's Red River Center for Water Education, said the Minnesota Legislature provided some funds.
"It allows teachers to integrate watershed science into the curriculum, using the three 'r's -- rigor, relevance and research," he said. "We're trying to make it as real-world as possible."
The students plot their calculations on a website developed for CoCoRaHS, short for Community Collective Rain, Hail and Snow Network, which the National Weather Service uses to collect data from all over the region.
"It's interesting, and we get to be outdoors," Abel said.
They're also earning college credits, through a cooperative program with Northland Community and Technical College.
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"I'm very interested to see how the weather service might use this for the spring flood forecasts," Thompson said. "And they love going for River Watch, being outside in the spring and doing something that's useful."
The juniors and seniors in Thompson's advanced biology class were 3 or 4 years old during the 1997 flood, many of them displaced from their homes.
"Do we have all the answers," Thompson asked the class. "No, we don't. That's the beauty of this. The flooding that these kids have all experienced is something they can relate to. What a teaching moment."
Reach Bonham at (701) 780-1110; (800) 477-6572, ext. 110; or send e-mail to kbonham@gfherald.com .
