The Center for Snow & Avalanche Studies serves the mountain science community and regional resource managers by hosting & conducting interdisciplinary research and conducting integrative 24/7/365 monitoring that captures weather, snowpack, radiation, soils, plant community and hydrologic signals of regional climate trends.
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Campaign to Sustain Senator Beck Basin
CSAS and its Senator Beck Basin long-term monitoring study site are in a fight to survive. In order to continue operations past this season, and into our Fiscal Year 2012/2013, we need to raise $135,000 by June 30, 2012.We have already received pledges, but need more stakeholder agencies to step forward. More ...Latest News!
- May 11, 2012: Today our Swamp Angel Study Plot reached Snow All Gone (SAG) at the earliest date we've recorded (since 2004).
- May 10, 2012: We've added a series of graphs plotting various soil data against snowpack. They are also an interesting way to compare snowpack across years and study sites.
- May 3, 2012: We are on the final leg of what is likely to be our final Colorado Dust-on-Snow trip for the season, traveling a mountain loop from Silverton to Steamboat Springs to Fairplay and back.
- April 28, 2012: A couple more storms have come in, though the total water for the year is still the lowest in CSAS' nine-year history.
- April 16, 2012: Our first storm in a month (#21 for the season) brought much needed 1.2" of water and over a foot of non-dusty snow.
- April 8, 2012: We've now experienced 8 dust events for Water Year 2012 and our stream gauge has already reached 4 cfs (earliest in our period of record). Many say we haven't seen a winter as dry as this one since 2002, but alas our data collection didn't begin until 2003.
- March 20, 2012: After two weeks of sunshine, this season's 5th dust event came in with the 20th storm of the season just as we returned from a 1,300 mile tour CODOS of Colorado's snowpack.
- March 13, 2012: Landry attended the Canyon Country Science Symposium in Moab, UT.
- March 6, 2012: Researchers from the Army's Cold Regions Research Lab, Boise State and Western Water Assessment have arrived to conduct a field campaign in CSAS' Senator Beck Basin Study Area.
- March 5, 2012: Just Published: Climate Researchers Catherine Naud (Columbia Univ.) and James Miller (Rutgers Univ.) utilized data from our our well-instrumented ground-based site [Senator Beck Basin] in their paper: (2012), Using satellites to investigate the sensitivity of longwave downward radiation to water vapor at high elevations, J. Geophys. Res., 117, D05101, doi:10.1029/2011JD016917.
- March 1, 2012: We've added a cool wind rose tool (thanks to John Snook) to visualize wind conditions at three of CSAS' study plots. You can now see wind roses for each winter storm or create wind roses for other periods of time.
- Feb 13, 2012: Our snowpack is on the rise with Storm #16 for the season.
- Feb 10, 2012: Chris Landry is just back from the USGS Colorado River Water Science Stakeholders' Roundtable in Salt Lake City.
- Jan 17, 2012: Finally another winter storm! 12" at Swamp Angel. Wind blew off most from Senator Beck.
- Dec 31, 2011: Year ended with a gust of 94mph recorded at our Putney ridge top site. Strongest gust since Feb 19, 2011. With that wind, we also received our 3rd dust event of the season.
- Dec 11, 2011: CSAS and Chris Landry in a New York Times article on air quality in the West.
- Nov 30, 2011: Check out 2 new blog posts with info from CSAS: Cool Climate Collaboration and Never Stop Exploring
- Nov 26, 2011: Our Swamp Angel datalogger freaked out early Thanksgiving, just before Storm #8. Everything was working again by Nov 26th (after the storm).
- Nov 18, 2011: Our annual fundraising letter is in the mail. The beginning of winter is our meager budget's leanest time of the year. We appreciate those of you who are making donations and holiday shopping with our "Shop for CSAS" campaign!
- Oct 27, 2011: We've posted summary graphs to give you a snapshot of 7 years of CSAS data.
- Oct 4-6, 2011: We experienced a wet and windy 1st winter storm of the season. See our Storm Report for the details.
- October 5, 2011: We've posted our Summer 2011 data and metadata. The past 12 months turned out to be our biggest water year yet with 55" of water!
- October 2011: Patagonia used a photo of one of our dust-on-snow "gravimetric" pits for their "Seeing Red" essay in the latest catalog!
Contact Us:
Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies
1428 Greene Street, #103, PO Box 190
Silverton, CO 81433 USA
Phone: 970.387.5080; Fax: 970.387.5082
email: clandry@snowstudies.org