There are two ground validation sites in the Mammoth Lakes area, CUES and Panorama Dome, are part of 13 planned flight, weekly and bi-weekly from Jan to May 2020 for NASA SnowEx.
NASA SnowEx 2020
Snow research and CUES
Snow research at UC Santa Barbara and The Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) and University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Energy Site