RAPID: Snow Sensor Maintenance in Boulder Creek and Jemez River Basin CZOs

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

The project will maintain distributed snow sensor arrays in the Boulder Creek (BC) and Jemez River (JRB) Basin Critical Zone Observatories (CZO?s). These snow sensor arrays complement existing CZO infrastructure. These snow sensor arrays, combined with existing instrumentation at the CZO?s, create hydrologic instrument clusters to explore feedbacks between hydrological and ecological processes, constrain models of water and carbon fluxes, and improve predictions of ecosystem impacts associated with climate change. These snow sensor arrays are compatible with those operating at KREW (Sierra CZO) and represent a comprehensive network of co-located snow, soil, and vegetation water use measurements. The continued maintenance of the snow measurements will enable data acquisition to continue in winter 2010-11 without data gaps. This project, in cooperation with the Sierra CZO, lays the foundation for a distributed snow hydrology measurement network design across these three Critical Zone Observatories. While the emphasis of the proposed research is on continuing and maintaining snow-measurement programs already initiated, the data sets collected and collaboration across CZOs will lay the foundation for a more-uniform and broader cross-CZO snow-measurement network. These data are important in establishing general relationships between physiographic variability and patterns of snow distribution and melt. The CZO program allows for the first time a sustained effort over various temporal climatic variations in three different mountain regimes that are representative of the Western U.S.