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Water Year 2021

  • April 1, 2021: Spring 2021 is here, visit our Colorado Dust-on-Snow website to see how spring snow conditions are effected by the dust Colorado has received so far this season.
  • February 23, 2021: What can you do about dust-on-snow? Read this article in Adventure Pro Magazine to find out.
  • February 20, 2021: Pretty mild dust season so far. But we are headed into the time of season where we typically received the most events.
  • January 16, 2021: SnowEx started this week. The Durango Herald ran this piece about snow research in our Senator Beck Study Basin.
  • December 1, 2020: Chris George, founding member of CSAS has retired as President of the Board.  Chris’ long career is unbelievable.  Pioneered an INSTAAR snow study project in the early 1970’s, helped establish Outward Bound in the United States, advocated for the inception of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, founding member of Mountain Studies Institute, and all around good guy.  Read more about this snow guru on our staff page.  The Durango Herald ran this piece on Chris’s amazing life.
  • After a record hot and dry summer and autumn we are finally heading into winter.  A good start so far in that on October 25 we received 0.7″ precipitation and November 7-9 we received 3.1″ at Senator Beck Basin.  It will take a big snow year to dig out from the exceptional drought we are in.  Soil moisture deficit is massive and soils are first in line to be replenished before water can make its way to streams.

Water Year 2020

  • April 30 and still holding on to a relatively mild dust season so far this spring.  Still plenty of dust to affect snowmelt but still considered light in terms of what we usually receive.
  • We posted two new journal publications that CSAS participated in on our publications page:  USGS researchers authored Dust Deposited on Snow Cover in the San Juan Mountains, Colorado, 2011–2016: Compositional Variability Bearing on Snow‐Melt Effects.  And researchers from Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory authored Microorganisms Associated With Dust on Alpine Snow.
  • March 10 and going into spring, this is the dust-on-snow season.  We currently have a mild dust layer in the Northern San Juan snowpack, discontinuous and at variable depths across the landscape.  Snow is expected this week.  And SnowEx continues, see this article by the Gazette Telegraph.
  • CSAS contributed an article to the Water Report, a newsletter focused on water in the West.  The article is a plain language summary of the research and monitoring we do at our Senator Beck Study Basin as well as our state-wide dust-on-snow monitoring.  An easy read for anyone wanting to get up to speed on these subjects.
  • The snowpack is doing great so far this season.  We are at median levels or slightly better so far, keep it coming.
  • This February 19-21, 2020 we are offering Snow School for Water Professionals.  This combination classroom and field course is ideal for anyone wanting to learn more about the role of snow and our mountain systems as it pertains to water resources.  Please contact Jeff Derry at jderry@snowstudies.org with any questions.  Get the flyer here to post in your workplace.
  • We are pleased to host SnowEx for another winter season.  NASA is developing a snow-sensing satellite and is using Senator Beck Study Basin to develop the instrumentation and algorithms. The project, called SnowEx, is a multi-year airborne snow campaign. Its goal is to collect multi-sensor observations, including radar, lidar, multispectral imagery, along with ground-truth observations throughout SBB and other study basins throughout the West. The intent is to determine which techniques work best for measuring snow, and to combine these in a design for the development of a snow-sensing satellite. The first effort began in WY2016 and now we are excited to have them back in WY2020.
  • The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its 2019 report.  Read about the impacts of climate change on mountain regions here. Hats off to our Board member Heidi Steltzer for all her hard work contributing to this report.  Read this article where Heidi details what this means for the Colorado Mountains.
  • After a great snow season in WY2019 and a dry summer and fall, we are now in a new water year (WY2020).  As of October 21 we have received 0.5″ of precipitation at Senator Beck Research Basin.
  • After much work from many folks a publication of which our Senator Beck Study Basin data is included was published. The paper is titled “Meteorological and evaluation datasets for snow modelling at 10 reference sites: description of in situ and bias-corrected reanalysis data”. The work describes in situ meteorological forcing and evaluation data, and bias correction reanalysis forcing data, for cold region modelling at 10 sites. These long term datasets are the reference sites chosen for evaluating models participating in the Earth System Model-Snow Model Intercomparison Project. The paper can be downloaded at the following link: https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/11/865/2019/

Water Year 2019

  • Dust on surface but getting covered with even more precipitation, what a big snow year.  See the NPR article about Center for Snow related to current conditions that ran May 6, 2019.
  • See this article about our Board member Heidi Steltzer and about her important work across the globe including the San Juans
  • We received dust event #3 on April 9-10. This was a moderate event, the first one this season, and will play a role in melting the snow this spring.  Dust event #1 and #2 were both light events.
  • Incredible, the first 8 days of March we received what we usually receive the entire month of March on average.  Historic avalanche cycle.
  • See you at the Outdoor Retailer Snow Show at the Denver Convention Center January 30 – February 1.
  • After a series of productive storms in January we are now near median snowpack.  See our storm summary reports for details.
  • This February 20-22, 2019 we are offering Snow School for Water Professionals.  This combination classroom and field course is ideal for anyone wanting to learn more about the role of snow and our mountain systems as it pertains to water resources.  Please contact Jeff Derry at jderry@snowstudies.org with any questions.
  • Dismal water WY2018 is now over. October 1-30 we have received 4.7″ of precipitation at Senator Beck Research Basin.  A good start to Water Year 2019.

Water Year 2018

  • Once again CSAS is offering Snow School for Water Professionals this year from February 28 – March 2, 21018. This combination classroom and field course will begin on Wednesday morning at our office in Silverton and end on Friday afternoon. This class is perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about the role of snow and our mountain systems as it pertains to water resources. Please do not hesitate to contact Jeff Derry at jderry@snowstudies.org with questions.
  • Denver International Airport Exhibit: We just installed 4 display cases at DIA focused on CSAS, dust-on-snow, and the science we support at Senator Beck. This three month long display is part of the Colorado Snow & Ice Exhibit and can be seen in the walkway towards Terminal A before you get to security. If you walk from the Main Terminal toward Terminal A, you will soon see the display cases, so even if you intend to go through the main security gate, and have time, the display is still easy to view. As part of the DIA effort, Christi Bode with Moxicran Media, made a 2-minute promotional video. This video is also located at the top of this homepage.
  • Upgraded Website: You may have noticed our new and improved website. Initially, you will see pretty much the same content but with a new flare, but we have a number of improvements and new tools in the works that I will share with you as they become available.

Water Year 2017

  • Jan 6: CODOS Update issued Dust Free So Far and Healthy Snowpack
  • Jan 5: Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner speaks with NASA SnowEx project scientist Edward Kim and Center for Snow & Avalanche Studies director Jeff Derry. Learn more at Colorado Public Radio’s website
  • Nov 18: Register now for our 2017 Snow School for Water Managers which will be held March 1st-3rd, 2017. Space is limited. Sign up today!
  • Nov 1: CODOS issued Center for Snow Update
  • Oct 31: The Swamp Angel and Senator Beck study plots have been selected as reference sites for the Earth System Model-Snow Model Intercomparison Project (ESM-SnowMIP,). These sites are of great value to ESM-SnowMIP because of the availability of high-quality meteorological and hydrological measurements at different elevations and over multiple years. ESM-SnowMIP will assess the strengths and weaknesses of snow models as a contribution to the World Climate Research Programme’s Grand Challenge on “Melting Ice & Global Consequences”. The ability of models to predict melt rates for snow with dust loading in the Senator Beck Basin Study Area will be of particular interest.
  • Oct 22: Executive Director, Jeff Derry, presented at American Association of Geographers in Colorado Springs and discussed the new SnowEx campaign at SBSB as well as our unique dust-on-snow monitoring program.
  • Sep 1: NASA is developing a snow-sensing satellite and is using Senator Beck Study Basin to develop the instrumentation and algorithms. The project, called SnowEx, is a multi-year airborne snow campaign. Its goal is to collect multi-sensor observations, including radar, lidar, multispectral imagery, along with ground-truth observations throughout SBSB. The intent is to determine which techniques work best for measuring snow, and to combine these in a design for the development of a snow-sensing satellite. The team began with “snow off” fly-overs of bare ground September 28 – October 4, 2016. “Snow on” fly-overs will take place this February 2017.Since the SnowEx project wants to push current techniques until they break, focusing on challenges presented by forests and extreme topographical relief, SBSB is the perfect venue to collect a unique dataset that will enable snow mission trade studies while also enabling scientific inquiry. In addition, because of SBSB’s long history of lidar airborne campaigns, snow science research with over a 10-year meteorological and stream flow dataset, NASA deemed the SBSB the ideal location to conduct the first year campaign. For more information please visit nsidc.org/data/snowex and snow.nasa.gov/snowex
  • Aug 1: CODOS Update issued “WY 2016 Season Summary”
  • Feb 19: CODOS Update issued D2 for WY2016 at Senator Beck Basin
  • Feb 10-12: This year’s CSAS Snow School for Water Professionals enjoyed hands-on snow observing experience in the field, following morning indoor sessions focusing on snow climatology, snowpack formation, snowmelt energy budgets, and snow data sources and interpretation issues.

    From left to right: Matt Hardesty: Colorado Division of Water Resources, Sarah Baker: Bureau of Reclamation, Lower Colorado Region, William Banks: USGS, Southeast Colorado Office, Jesse Jaminet: Colorado Division of Water Resources, Laurna Kaatz: Denver Water, Planning Division

  • Jan 27-29: Jeff Derry attended the Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention in Denver, attracting over 500 stakeholders in Colorado water policy and management, including many of our CODOS program supporters and users.
  • October 5: CSAS’s Summer 2015 data is now available, as Excel workbooks, on our Archived Data webpage. The datasets span June 21, 2015 through September 30, 2015. Our comprehensive workbook contains several worksheets for various time intervals, including 1-hour, 3-hour, and 24-hour summary data. Also presented are updated Metadata for Swamp Angel, Senator Beck, and Putney Study Plots. The complete, integrative Senator Beck Basin dataset revealed compelling details and insight on the highly unusual “Water Year” (October 2014 through 2015) throughout Colorado.
  • September 1: The Arizona Republic recently ran an extended series of articles describing stresses on the Colorado River system and its water users, with a focus on Colorado snow. CSAS’s Chris Landry spent a day with the reporting team in April and the article features visits to several of our Colorado Dust-on-Snow program field sites, along with quotes from Landry and extracts from the CODOS Water Year 2015 Season Summary. View the complete Arizona Republic article by clicking here.
  • June 25: CSAS Executive Director Chris Landry presented a review of “what has the science taught us …” about dust-on-snow at the 40th annual Colorado Water Workshop in Gunnison on June 24. The workshop has a long and storied history of presenting new science and “all responsible positions” on water issues, and this panel discussion included a review of climate change science as well. Neither dust-on-snow nor climate change were on the agenda at the first Water Workshop, 40 years ago. Landry’s first presentation about dust-on-snow at the Water Workshop was in summer 2006.
  • June 24: CSAS’s Winter 2014/2015 Senator Beck Basin data have been QC’d and are now posted, as Excel workbooks, on our Archived Data webpage. Winter 2014/2015 data began October 1, 2014 and run through June 20, 2015. Each Excel workbook – for the Swamp Angel, Senator Beck, and Putney Study Plots – contains several worksheets for various time intervals, including 1-hour, 3-hour, and 24-hour summary data. Also presented are updated Metadata for each study plot, a “Sensor Status” workbook showing instrument height above the snow surface and other data, a compilation of all of the Winter 2014/2015 snow profiles performed in Senator Beck Basin, and a snow profile metadata document describing our methods. This was a highly unusual winter throughout Colorado and the complete, integrative Senator Beck Basin dataset captured the details, perhaps as well as any location in Colorado.
  • June 9: See our report on the recent rain event and streamflow effects
  • May 31: May 2015 precipitation was exceptional at Senator Beck Basin, and in the Red Mountain Pass locale. Our Noah II precipitation gauge at the Swamp Angel Study Plot recorded 201 mm (7.91″) of water equivalent, almost all in the form of snow (only 8 mm as rain). That exceeded the May 2011 total of 190 mm as well as the 1995 total of 7.60″ (193 mm) at the nearby Red Mountain Pass Snotel, the largest May in that Snotel site’s 30-year period of record. We recorded at least 1 mm of precipitation on 27 of the 31 days in May 2015. See our precipitation data graphs. More details to follow …
  • April 6: CODOS Update issued title “WY 2015 Unfolding“
  • April 3: CODOS Update issued title “CODOS Dust Alert-Event D1-WY 2015”
  • April 2: CODOS was featured in the High Country News recent blog post “Colorado’s snow is dust-free for the first time in a decade” on Colorado’s dust-on-snow “dust free” March. To view the article, visit High Country News website. As it happened, CSAS and our Colorado Dust-on-Snow monitoring program logged it’s first dust-on-snow event at Senator Beck Basin just a couple days into April, and other locales also reported dust from that storm.  See our CODOS Program website at  www.codos.org.
  • April 2: A snow hydrology research team led by Karl Lapo, at the University of Washington, have recently presented a new peer reviewed paper in the prestigious journal Water Resources Research titled “Impact of errors in the downwelling irradiances on simulations of snow water equivalent, snow surface temperature, and the snow energy balance”.  They utilized radiation measurements and other data from the Senator Beck Basin Swamp Angel Study Plot for this analysis.  The abstract for the paper is available here.
  • March 23: CODOS Update issued title “Dust-free Snowmelt Underway”
  • March 1: CODOS Update issued title “March 1 SWE Conditions” 
  • Feb 16: CODOS Update issued title “Dry Spell, Early Snowpack Warming “
  • Feb 11-13: This year’s CSAS Snow School for Water Professionals benefited from warm, dry, and sunny days here in the San Juan Mountains.  Participants Rob Phillips from the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, Nathan Elder from Denver Water, Brenna Mefford from the Wyoming State Engineer’s office, and Marta Nelson from Radiometrics Corporation in Boulder came to the session with four quite different job duties and perspectives.  
  • From left to right, Nathan (back to camera), Rob, Brenna, and Marta got hands-on snow observing experience in the field each day, following morning indoor sessions focusing on snow climatology, snowpack formation, snowmelt energy budgets, and snow data sources and interpretation issues.
  • Jan 29-30: Chris Landry attended the Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention in Denver, attended by some 500 stakeholders in Colorado water policy and management.  Highlights included panel discussions regarding climate change impacts on Colorado water supplies (where the impacts of dust-on-snow were also mentioned) and ‘worst case’ drought planning activities among the Upper Colorado River Basin states.  All of our CODOS program supporters and users were present at the meeting, and our former director Eric Kuhn participated, as always, in several of the panels and plenary sessions.
  • Jan 21: CODOS Update issued title “No Dust-on-Snow So Far, Looking Ahead Using CODOS Experience“
  • Dec 23: We’re very pleased that Senator Beck Basin data are supporting an expanding group of mountain researchers.  Our downwelling longwave radiation and other data were analyzed by Yonghua Chen (Columbia University) and her colleagues in a recent peer-reviewed journal article in Environmental Research Letters.  Mark Raleigh and his colleagues also utilized our data, along with data from comparable study areas, to test snow model sensitivities to errors in “forcing data”.  Still other papers now in review also utilize Senator Beck Basin data … stay tuned.  Also, several presentations at the just-concluded American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting utilized Senator Beck Basin data including two about snowcover modeling, by Mark Raleigh (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and Michael Follum (Army Corps of Engineers).
  • Oct 23: Jay Welz, a graduate student just wrapping up his snow hydrology MSc at Montana State University, came on board as the CSAS field operations manager-in-training.  Jay brings an extensive background in managing field science programs with the US Forest Service and a wealth of snow experience.  More about Jay later this season …
  • September 29 – October 3: CSAS attended the International Snow Science Workshop in Banff, Alberta, and Chris Landry presented a poster and paper on “Desert Dust and Snow Stability”. Japanese ISSW participants and others found the CSAS “Desert Dust and Snow Stability” of interest, vis-à-vis there own experiences with dust-on-snow.
  • August 19: CSAS conducted a field tour to the Swamp Angel Study Plot and Senator Beck Stream Gauge for a class of 24 Colorado State University undergraduate and graduate students during their Watershed Practicum in the San Juan Mountains.  Their faculty advisor Dr. Steven Fassnacht is at the far left, pointing toward the tower.  Chris Landry gave the class a talk on dust-on-snow later that day.
  • July 25:  CODOS WY 2014 Summary
    • July 19-27: Third survey of Senator Beck Basin vascular plant community completed: in a marathon effort from July 19-27, botanists Peggy Lyon, Sara Simonson, and Renee Rondeau (left to right in the July 20, 2014 photo to the right) completed our third comprehensive inventory of the Senator Beck Basin plant community.  Gordon Rodda also assisted.   Species and coverage were documented in a total of 230 plots of 0.1 m2 along 23 established transects at three different elevation bands, in the sub-alpine, at treeline, and across alpine tundra.  This dataset complements the original July 2004 baseline data and the July 2009 first repeat study. Comparative analyses will follow.

  • October 2013: A new paper uses Senator Beck Basin data to explore how downward surface radiation is affected by cloud changes. Naud et al. (2013), Sensitivity of downward longwave surface radiation to moisture and cloud changes in a high-elevation region, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118,10,072–10,081, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50644.
  • October 4, 2013: Summer data and complete 2013 Water Year graphs are now available.
  • September 23, 2013: First snow on the ground in Silverton (earlier in the morning), and 7 inches (.18m) of snow on the ground at Swamp Angel Study Plot.

  • September 20-21, 2013: David Scott, a CSU PhD student, conducts a forest health study, coring Spruce trees in Senator Beck Basin.

  • August 26, 2013: Ethan Gutmann from the National Center for Atmospheric Research Hydrometeorological Applications Program, and Warren Young, USFS soil scientist, visit Senator Beck Basin to do soil sampling for hydrologic properties testing.  
  • August 10, 2013: First dusting of snow on peaks surrounding Silverton.    
  • July 12, 2013: Several presentations at the Davos Atmosphere and Cryosphere Assembly (DACA-13, July 8-12) utilized data from or fieldwork at Senator Beck Study Area. In the Abstract Proceedings, see Deems et al. (page 10), Raleigh et al. (page 322), and Painter et al. (page 326).
  • June 24, 2013: We’ve published this past winter’s datasets for Swamp Angel, Senator Beck and Putney Study Plots. We’ve also updated our metadata and period of record datasets: snowstudies.org/data1.html
  • June 17, 2013:
    Final Report for Water Year 2013 Colorado Dust-on-Snow Program WY 2013 Summary
  • May 15, 2013: Snowmelt has really accelerated over the past couple of days. We’re updating graphs for Senator Beck Basin snowpack, precipitation and streamflow daily through SAG (Snow All Gone).

Graph of Height of Snow for 7 Winters at Swamp Angel Study Plot Graph of Height of Snow at Senator Beck Basin Study Plot Graph of Senator Beck Stream Gauge Cumulative Discharge in acre feet 

  • to Silverton for the week. Chris Landry gave several lectures and led them on a trip to Swamp Angel Study Plot.

    • Jan 12, 2013: Finally a storm to talk about! Storm #9 brought a record wind gust to SBSP (88mph) and snow depth at Swamp Angel reached more than 1 meter for the first time this season (at least for now).
    • Dec 31, 2012: We’ve added graphs for visual comparison of precip and snowpack between years. We’ve also updated several of our other Senator Beck Basin data graphs. Happy New Year!
    • Dec 25, 2012: The nicely timed low intensity Christmas Eve storm (#7) came through leaving a “severe clear” Christmas day in its wake. We await more snow tomorrow.
    • Dec 21, 2012: Happy Winter Solstice! The Aeronet tracking sun photometer at Swamp Angel

measured an extremely clear day

    •  yesterday and perhaps again today. Hence, our incoming solar radiation measurements represent the maximum possible on these shortest days of the year. Put your sunscreen on!