Blizzard conditions prevented Mike Gillespie from reaching Berthoud Pass on Monday, but that’s good news in his line of work as a snow surveyor for the federal government.
The storm helped raise Colorado’s snowpack to 110 percent of the state average for this time of year.
“We’re in pretty good shape,” Gillespie said Wednesday from his office in Lakewood. “The trend has been well above average in the south and closer to average or slightly below average up north.
“It’s not all that bad anywhere, and we still have about 60 percent of the winter accumulation period ahead of us.”
While Gillespie usually measures the snowpack himself on snowshoes, this year he is relying on the data beamed in from 127 remote measuring sites across the state to start his summer water-supply projections.
The critical measurement is the snow- water equivalent — the actual moisture contained in Colorado’s typically dry powder.
The snow-water equivalent for this time of year ranges from 141 percent of average in the Arkansas River basin to 85 percent in the basin for the Yampa and White rivers.
This week’s storm brought more wind than snow, but every bit of precipitation helps in the arid West, where as much as 80 percent of the year’s moisture used for agriculture and water supplies falls as winter flakes in the mountains.
“This helps for planning purposes,” Gillespie said. “We’ll be coming out with our first runoff forecasts of the year later this week. It’s time to begin planning for next summer’s water availability.”
The healthy snowpack comes as a surprise after an extremely dry November.
A series of huge storms in December more than made up for the deficit in the mountains.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, began measuring snow and forecasting water supplies after the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and surveyors such as Gillespie now collect data at more than 700 sites across the West.
Although automated equipment now collects data from most sites and transmits the information via radio waves, Monday’s trip to Berthoud Pass is more than a symbolic ritual, Gillespie said.
“It’s been a tradition,” he said, “but when we have our manual data, we basically double the number of sites and we’re able to more precisely refine the snowpack percentages.”
Steve Lipsher: 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com
