A behind the scenes look at how CSU measures snowpack

People may be tired of the snow at this point given all the problems it caused this winter season, but it’s a welcome sight for Colorado Spring Utilities.

CSU says our above average snowpack will help fill reservoirs and get us further away from drought conditions. On Thursday we took a behind the scenes look at how the CSU water system works.

In the snowy mountains of Buena Vista, officials figure out just how much water could be stored at our reservoirs. Kalsoum Abbasi the water supervisor for CSU says the data they collect is vital to water planning. “We really do depend on this data to help us plan our operations for the year, Abassi says, “To figure out how much space we need to make.”

One of their goals is to collect as much water as possible and with the snow Colorado has received this season Abbasi says, “In these really big years we are going into run off season with average storage and snowpack is well above average so that means we will not have room to collect every drop.”

To get to those high snowpack areas, Nick Miller a field operator who measures the snow needs to use a snowcat. It’s the same vehicle El Paso County search and rescue used to save people stuck in the Bomb Cyclone. “You can go anywhere,” says Miller.

Once he arrives Miller uses a seven and a half foot poll to see how deep the snow is. It read 74 and a half inches. That’s more than six feet deep, a big improvement over the average five-foot snowpack. “This year is quite phenomenal,” Miller says, “It topped out at 86 inches in some areas.”

Another thing Abbasi looks for is snow density. “What I’m interested in is how much water is in that snow?” What she means is when the snow melts, how much water will come from it. She says this year is not as dense as in the past but still above average.

Seeing all this snow, you might expect our reservoir storage to be at an all-time high right now. But Abbasi says they’re still at average capacity. The reason, “The thing to remember is there is a ton of snowpack but all of that water is still in the snow and it’s not really until it starts to melt in the late spring early summer,” Abbasi says, “that’s when we see our reservoirs start to climb.”

At this time 65 million gallons of water is flowing into Colorado Springs every day. The reason is because of an outage the Homestake pipeline had last year, it impacted storage levels at Rampart Reservoir.