CODOS Update May 27, 2022: May CODOS Observations — Colorado Dust-on-Snow Program (original) (raw)

Greetings from Silverton,

Well the snow season is nearly over with the bulk of the snowpack ablating over a month early in some regions. Streamflows have peaked particularly in Southern Colorado - again, upwards to a month early for some streams. There are a number of peak streamflow holdouts along the Northern and Front Range Mountains. Many streams will also see a nice bump in flows from the welcome precipitation events over last weekend across much of the state, the high elevations along the Front Range Mts have a lovely white blanket of snow as we head into June.

Last week we observed snow ablation at Senator Beck Basin and then made the last codos tour of the season digging snow profiles where there was still snow and sampling dust for USGS analyses.

Soon we will begin working on the summary report where we will detail this unique dusty winter season. Our preliminary analyses shows record melt rates in April at numerous SNOTEL sites including our data out of Senator Beck Study Basin. For example, at Wolf Creek the top three years of average daily loss of SWE in April was 2018, 2022, and 2020 (0.33”, 0.29”, 0.23”/day respectively). At Slumgullion it was 2022, 2018, 2017 (0.23”, 0.20”, 0.16”/day respectively). Stay tuned as we will dive into what this epic dust year meant for the Colorado snowpack and water resources.

Please see pictures from each monitoring site below along with brief notes of our observations.

Take Care,

Jeff Derry