Grand Mesa Study Plot

Cleaned (quality checked) and continuous hourly records of snow energy and mass balance variables from Grand Mesa Study Plot (GMSP). 

GMSP is located in an opening in a pine forest on the northern rim of the Grand Mesa (39.050802, -108.061435) in west central Colorado at 3239 m. 

The site was funded by the USGS (poc: Jayne Belnap), installed by the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies (poc: Jeff Derry), and is maintained by the Snow Optics Laboratory at NASA- JPL (poc: Thomas Painter). The study plot is primarily used to assess the spatial variability in the hydrologic impacts of dust on snow (see Skiles et al., 2015, DOI: 10.1002/hyp.10569). Real time data can be retried from MesoWest (station ID: GMSPC).

The study plot consists of a snow profile plot that contains a tower holding the instrumentation array. Tower measurements include wind speed and direction, air temperature and relative humidity, snowpack depth, incoming and outgoing broadband (BB; 0.285–2.800 μm) and near-infrared/shortwave-infrared (NIR/SWIR; 0.695–2.800 μm) solar radiation, and incoming longwave radiation values. Precipitation is from the nearby ‘Mesa Lakes’ Snow Telemetry site (SNOTEL; NRCS), which is located approximately 500m north of GMSP at 3048m under the assumption that precipitation is similar at the two sites.

Variables are accompanied by notes in adjacent columns to indicate if the value is measured, interpolated, or 'cleaned' (i.e snow depths are set to 0 after the snow depletion date). 

Note: Grand Mesa was a field site for the NASA SnowEx field campaign in Year 1 (2017), and will be again Year 3 (2019). GMSP is/was within airborne flight domains.

Dataset point of contact: S. McKenzie Skiles, Department of Geography, University of Utah ([e-mail])