Summary
As water shortages on the Colorado River become more dire, researchers are beginning an innovative campaign in the Rocky Mountains to better understand how high-elevation precipitation becomes surface water for 40 million people across the southwestern United States. For reasons related to the West’s changing climate, snow that falls in the Rocky Mountains—the source of about 80% of the Colorado—has been providing the river with less and less water. Next week, a campaign called the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) will start to measure atmospheric processes, such as the behavior of tiny particles that become snowflakes and weather patterns that influence how snow vanishes into thin air. SAIL will also measure where, when, and how much rain and snow fall, helping hydrologists better understand how water moves through mountains and into streams. The data are intended to sharpen models that produce a variety of critical forecasts, including short-term predictions of seasonal stream flows and long-term scenarios of how climate change might alter regional water supplies.
