Colorado’s Snowpack: Adventures in Monitoring and What It Means for Our Water Supply

Dr. Gigi Richard

Wednesday, February 27 | 6PM | Third Street Center, Carbondale
Thursday, February 28 | 6PM | Hallam Lake, Aspen
 

Colorado’s winter snowpack is an important component of the state’s water supply. Understanding how snowpack accumulates at different elevations in Colorado’s mountains, and how the snow becomes streamflow in the spring is critical to efficient management of our water resources. In collaboration with CSU faculty and students from CSU, CMU and FLC, a statewide monitoring effort enhancing our understanding of water yield from snowpack at varying elevations has been established. Dr. Richard will share some of the challenges of hydrologic monitoring in a mountain environment and will explore the preliminary results from this ongoing study.

Dr. Gigi Richard is currently a Visiting Instructor in Geosciences at Fort Lewis College. For the past 16 years, she was a Professor of Geology at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, where she also co-founded and co-directed of the Hutchins Water Center. 

Naturalist Nights are made possible through a partnership between Wilderness Workshop, Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), and Roaring Fork Audubon. In addition, we thank the following sponsors for their support of the Naturalist Nights program: