HAPPY JACK, Ariz. — After last week’s huge storm, the Salt River Project is tallying how much water it brought into the state by heading up north to measure for themselves.
It's a long hike to the SNOTEL station where hydrologists are trying to figure out how much water is in all the snow.
SNOWTEL stands for snow telemetry – a network of more than 900 automated data collection sites located in remote, high-elevation mountain watersheds in the western U.S.
The scientific equipment in the middle of nowhere has been around for decades.
“Some of them as far back as the 70s," said Bo Svoma an SRP meteorologist. "Others in Arizona we've had installed more recently."
They make to trek to sites like these about once a month instead of getting the information over the internet. Svoma said it's because they've been doing it that way for decades.
“This equipment’s been around a lot longer than the automated snow depth sensor of the SNOTEL site here,” Svoma said.
The test is simple: shove it in the ground, pull out the snow, hang it on a scale and it'll tell you how much water’s in the snow.
It’s not just for record-keeping, though.
SRP needs to know how much water is in the snow to know how much water its system will get when the snow melts.
“How far they're going to be ... into summer when it's hot and dry, and we have to make big deliveries,” Svoma said.
From there, SRP can decide how much water to release and what goes into the ground to recharge the groundwater.
In good shape
So far, we’re in good shape water-wise, Svoma said.
"We're above average now, which is incredible because we were below average all winter until February hit,” Svoma said. "If we get another round of wet weather, then it'll be quite the turnaround from where we were three weeks ago.”
Svoma said there’s still time for more storms to roll through.
And he and the rest of the team will keep coming here every month to see how much there is.
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