New technology in Upper Colorado River Basin states will measure water lost to the sky
To help quantify how much water is lost as evapotranspiration — the biggest unknown in estimating water use — the Upper Colorado River Commission is installing EC towers across its basin. For now, the eddy-covariance towers measure the water lost from soil and plants to the sky and carbon dioxide, a major component of global warming. The towers take measurements 20 to 40 times every second, and each one costs a half- million dollars. One is up and running now at the Southwestern Colorado Research Center in Yellow Jacket. “Come next year, around this time, we will have 32 operating fully seamless, all of them communicating in the entire upper basin,” said Kaz Maitaria, Ph.D., a staff engineer at the Upper Colorado River Commission and a Fulbright Scholar.
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