CODOS UPDATE NOVEMBER 8, 2024: Dust SYMPOSIUM, WINTER KICKS INTO GEAR
Greetings from Silverton,
It is a beautiful sunny morning here after a few days of snow. There’s already pretty good coverage up high. Exciting things have been happening; here are a few updates.
On October 30th, the Nexus of Land and Water Symposium took place in Cortez, CO, at the Sunflower Theater. It was an effort spearheaded by the Wright-Ingraham Institute, Mountain Studies Institute (MSI), and a core group of professionals. Over 80 speakers and guests attended the symposium, it was an amazing turnout! Presentations from a wide range of professionals ranged from overviews of the dust-on-snow issue and snow modeling efforts, to farmers handling water scarcity in the San Luis Valley, to those trying to engineer and assist biocrust development on bare ground using natural strains of fungus or cyanobacteria, and many more.
What an incredible day, which wasn’t nearly long enough to cover what needed to be talked about. Follow the Wright-Ingraham Institute on social media for updates on the video release of the symposium, which they will post on their YouTube Channel and website. The Colorado Sun was in attendance, and just posted this article covering the event: What’s behind Colorado’s dirty snow? And Jonathan Thompson with the Land Desk wrote about the day. If you are not familiar with the Land Desk it is essential reporting on issues facing the West.
Our season summary report is just now posted on codos.org, take a look at the Season Summary of WY 2024 on our webpage. It was a warm winter, characterized by fewer, big storm cycles that kept our SWE near-normal nearing the end of the season. We saw some record melt weeks in April, and then late season snow pushed streamflow peaks later (to near-normal) for northern Colorado, while southern Colorado saw early peak flow. Most streamflow was near or above-average, excepting some lower Colorado river basins. We had an average dust year with five dust-on-snow events, with the biggest hit coming March 2-3rd. For more details and plots, check it out here!
Next up, some plots from our study sites. We have seen some good snow start out WY 2025 in October and in the beginning of November. We consider the start of winter to be when our Senator Beck Study Basin has at least 50% persistent snow coverage. Great to see winter started in October this year! Swamp Angel snow depth is already at a half of a meter, and temperatures started to plunge with the nice snowfall that has rolled in.
We also are excited about our new snow scale to measure snow water equivalent at the Swamp Angel study plot this year (details on all our new sensors still to come!). The USGS has the same instrument at their Senator Beck station, which is co-located with our station at 12,186’.
The short-term outlook into November looks snowy and cool! It’s fixin’ to be a La Nina year, though lots of factors come into play with snowfall totals, so I’m excited to see how the season progresses.
Snow School for Water Professionals: We have had a lot of interest in Snow School for Water Professionals to be held this February 19-21, 2025. The combination classroom and field course will begin on Wednesday morning at our office in Silverton and end on Friday afternoon (2.5 days). The class is perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about the role of snow and our mountain environments as it pertains to water resources, designed to enhance understanding of snowpack processes, snow monitoring and data. Please see details in the link above. Please email me (jderry@snowstudies.org) with any questions.
More Soon