Avalanche center buffs up weather stations across Colorado as new winter season gets underway
It's been a project two years in the making for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center; getting their weather stations scattered around the state up to date, fixed up or simply functioning again.
The stations provide a localized look at conditions where radar would just have to extrapolate data to understand what's going on, and that kind of accuracy is key when suggesting where is safe for outdoors people to head in the snow and where is riskier. CAIC Deputy Director Brian Lazar said these stations are basically at the heart of everything they do.
"We do very much rely on this telemetry to help us inform and make better avalanche forecasts," Lazar said. "It's crucial you really couldn't do the job without it."
The CAIC has more than 300 stations (your reporter in the mountains Spencer Wilson sat there and counted for you) which help establish a level of confidence in weather reporting and forecasting, relied upon by savvy outdoor explorers, especially in the winter months. Still, only 15 of those are owned and operated by CAIC itself.
"They may be run by ski areas or other organizations that we just ingest and display that data," Lazar said. "Now that we've got them and have learned to rely on them to fill in key data gaps.
"When they go down, we feel that pain acutely," Lazar said.
The stations have varying levels of equipment, but can help capture data points like temperature, wind speed, direction, and dewpoint; that is, so long as they are running correctly.
"In some cases, you know, the sensors or the instrumentation has been out there for well over a decade, and it just starts to degrade over time because these stations live in such harsh environments," Lazar said. "So we update the sensors to continue to have an accurate data stream. In some cases, we're adding new sensors, you know, like radar-based precipitation gauges, for example, which give us new information in locations where we've been measuring other variables for a long length of time."
While they are operating with a great picture of the Colorado high country, there's always more to be done.
Lazar said the CAIC is looking into whether or not a few additional stations on the Flat Tops of Colorado, between Steamboat Springs and Glenwood Springs would be worth the cost and time to install for a better, more accurate viewpoint.
"We have to be judicious in how many weather stations we put in around the state," Lazar said, lamenting that there's a limited supply of weather stations.