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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CSAS and Collaborators Perform CODOS Fieldwork throughout Colorado Mountains in Spring 2009The consensus throughout Western Slope of Colorado by June was that the spring of 2009 was an extraordinary dust-on-snow season producing more and larger events than anyone, going back several generations, could recall. While anecdotal, and not verified by hard data (since no one before our team has previously made rigorous observations), we do not dismiss those The CSAS’s Colorado Dust-on-Snow program team led by Chris Landry and his field assistant Andrew Temple, in collaboration with Dr. Tom Painter from the Snow Optics Laboratory at the University of Utah, and his graduate students McKenzie Skiles (MSc student) and Annie Bryant (PhD candidate), was literally “all over the place”, making several 1,000 mile “laps” around the Colorado mountains to observe and sample the (up to) 12 layers of dust present throughout the State’s mountains. Here are some snapshots from those trips …
Sunset at Spring Creek Pass on our first excursion to the ten additional sites where we monitor dust-in-snow around the Colorado Mountains. The snowpit here is seen, faintly, down and to the right of the sign.
Our April tour happened to intersect with a ferocious “up-slope” blizzard on the Front Range of Colorado on April 17, resulting in “difficult” conditions for fieldwork (here at Berthoud Pass) and considerable driving challenges including avalanches over the highway.
Tom Painter is seen here putting the finishing touches on our April snowpit at Rabbit Ears Pass.
Annie and McKenzie showing off the evidence in the Rabbit Ears Pass snowpit wall of their
superbly executed set of dust-in-snow samples.
Annie, McKenzie, and Andrew on May 12, 2009, en-route to upper Senator Beck Basin for dust-on-snow sampling and field spectrometry measurements. Their heavy packs are belied by the smiles on a beautiful spring day.