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With all due respect, I have spent five years on this specific project, spend day in day out designing projects for data analysis for my work in soccer and have learnt and forgotton more about the geography of the PNW in the last five years than most would know in a lifetime. But thank you anyway.

The biggest cost would be people's time IMO. A three year project, four people fully committed with various beneficial attributes, I think it could absolutely be done personally. I'm confident I could create a plan that gives the best chance possible too, based on initial analysis of thousands of reports.

$400K to kill. $500K to capture.

Explorer pointed out in a different thread that higher resolution for stats are needed. Currently the SSR does not offer search criteria with enough resolution to study multiple counties, selected at will. It can only produce stats for one county at a time. This is a deficiency which I'm working to correct.

Gigantor, thanks for generating and sharing these interesting plots. When I see the spread in elevations for summer (0 to 5,500 ft) and winter (0 to 3,500 ft), it is hard to draw conclusions unless we know that the land area where those reports are coming from is consistent. I know they are all from Washington State, but the range in elevations in WA State is huge per county (see attached map) and the BF reports come from a broad range of counties. For example, BFRO reports from Kitsap County (max elevation of 1,761 ft) and Thurston County (max elevation of 2,922 ft) are not going to show that kind of broad distribution in elevation between summer and winter. Likewise, there are some counties in Eastern WA that have a narrow elevation spread (from min to max). For example, the lowest elevation in Spokane county is 1,538 ft (along the Spokane River) and the highest elevation if 5,883 ft. Attached is a map put together by County Highpointers, showing the five WA counties with the highest standard deviation in elevation over their means. Four of them go from coast to high Cascade peaks and one goes from coast to Olympic peninsula peaks. Taking into account the different distributions of elevation among the WA counties, then it would be interesting to check if we see any difference in the average elevation from BF reports between summer and winter for the following 3 groupings: 1) For those counties that have a narrow elevation distribution (with low elevations and close to coast). 2) For those counties that have a narrow elevation distribution (with higher elevation and away from the coast). 3) For those counties that have a broad elevation distribution (going from coast to high elevation mountains). I think group 3 (which would include the Cascade and Olympic range counties) are the dominant group in the BFRO database and would probably show what you showed in the graphs. However, you might be able to remove the noise from those other 2 groups.