Greetings from Silverton,
The Senator Beck Basin (SBB) received its eighth dust event of the season yesterday afternoon (May 11) and into the evening. No surprise, the morning of May 11 Phil (CSAS employee) was driving through the four corners region on the way to Prescott and said it was white knuckle driving with the high winds and dust. Then in the afternoon the San Juans started seeing the winds and hazy skies. Dust cameras are showing dusty skies this morning so more dust is possible today (May 12). This event is falling on an already dusty snow surface so it will be difficult, if not impossible, to assess its severity. We will take mass loading samples and deduce loading of this event by subtracting out other sample weights from other individual dust events. But the damage is already done. The existing cumulative dust layers at the snow surface along with the relentless sunny/warm weather is melting the snow quickly. In the last 7.5 days at Swamp Angel we lost 17.7" of snow depth. Red Mountain SNOTEL lost 5" of SWE in the same time-frame, and currently shows 8.4" SWE remaining. Wolf Creek lost 8.2" SWE and currently shows 3.8" remaining. We will report on our findings for Northern and Front Range CODOS sites at mid-week.
More from Silverton soon.
Photo from Abajo dust camera the morning of May 12. At the time of this writing more dust could be coming to the Colorado mountains.
Winds have been straight out of the SSW for the duration of dust event #8