October 22, 2019: Snow School, SnowEx, IPCC, Etec.
Greetings from Silverton,
Drought has crept back into Colorado as we head into the winter season. After a great snow season last year it was followed by a dry summer and fall. So far this water year (WY2020) we have logged 0.5" of water falling on the landscape around Senator Beck Study Basin. Hopefully we will see the few inches of snow we currently have stick around and added to, marking it as the beginning of snow accumulation. We are ready for the snow to fall here in Silverton after a good deal of station maintenance, reporting, and data management taking place this summer.
Snow School: As always we are looking forward to offering Snow School for Water Professionals again this winter season. This year the class will be held February 19 - 21, 2020. The combination classroom and field course will begin on Wednesday morning at our office in Silverton and end on Friday afternoon (2.5 days). This class is perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about the role of snow and our mountain environments as it pertains to water resources. If the stars align just right the class will overlap with the SnowEx data collection campaign. Attached is a flyer, please post in your workplace and please do not hesitate to contact me with questions. Click here to see this flyer on our website. You can pay with credit card at snowstudies.org.
SnowEx: 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 suite of instrumentation required. The project 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 in 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 in the deployment of a snow-sensing (think SWE) satellite. The first effort began in WY2016 and now we are excited to have them back in WY2020.
IPCC Report: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with a new report recently. The Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate assesses the latest impacts of climate change on the ocean and cryosphere. CSAS Board member Heidi Steltzer co-authored the report's chapter on the high mountains. Heidi has a long history doing research in Senator Beck, East River, and throughout Colorado. Follow this link to an article of a study in East River near Crested Butte in which Heidi is interviewed and elaborates what climate change means for the Colorado Mountains. Good work Heidi!
