Here are Ed Quillen’s insights into the new year from the High Country News. From the article:

Petroleum prices will spike for some reason or another, perhaps political tension in the Persian Gulf or a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever the gulf, this will inspire politicians to demand the immediate development of “America’s vast oil shale reserves” in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. And of course they will denounce anyone who points out that to date, there is no economical method of producing petroleum from these rocks as they forget the old but true saying that “Oil shale is the fuel of the future — and always will be.”

Or my personal favorite, “Oil shale has been the next big thing in Colorado for over a hundred years.”

More from Ed:

The Colorado River will continue to be over-appropriated, and someone will propose supplying southern California with water via tanker ships from Siberia or towed icebergs from Alaska, thereby allowing California’s share to be used by other states. But no such water will be imported in 2011.

From The Ag Journal (Candace Krebs):

“In 10 years, we won’t be talking about global warming, we’ll be talking about nitrogen,” Jay Ham, a meteorology and environmental expert in the soil and crop sciences department at Colorado State University said. “It’s a way bigger issue.” Everyone’s heard about minimizing their carbon footprint, sequestering carbon or trading carbon credits. But nitrogen, which converts into a particle capable of traveling long distances when it escapes into the atmosphere, is getting more attention in Colorado and around the country. During the Colorado Ag Classic, Ham explained that nitrogen is a greenhouse gas 300 times more efficient at trapping atmospheric radiation than carbon dioxide. It impairs visibility and interferes with plant and animal life. The level of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere has increased 20 percent over the last century…

Ham attributes half of agricultural nitrogen to concentrated animal feeding operations and another quarter of it to farm fertilizer. “In some crop and livestock systems, we’re removing 20 to 30 percent of the nitrogen we’re applying,” he said. “We can lose it to air or to water. So one thing we can do is to improve agricultural efficiency.” There are three main ways to keep nitrogen from escaping into the atmosphere, Ham said. They include reducing inputs, retaining more of the nitrogen in the finished product or storing it on-farm.

From The Durango Herald:

The Colorado Farm Bureau has awarded outgoing state Sen. Bruce Whitehead, D-Hesperus, with the 2010 Pinnacle Award in recognition of his support of the agricultural community during the 2010 legislative session…

The annual award recognizes legislators who “go above and beyond the call of duty to promote Colorado’s agricultural interests,” a bureau news release said. “This is evident through their sponsorship and co-sponsorship of bills, their leadership in defending and advocating on behalf of Colorado agriculture, their cooperation with the industry, and their voting record on Farm Bureau priority issues.”[…]

“He worked for the Colorado Division of Water Resources for 25 years and was the past executive director for the Southwestern Water Conservation District,” [the bureau’s president, Don Shawcroft] said. “We look forward to seeing what the future holds for you.” Whitehead served as chairman of the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee during the 2010 legislative session. He was appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter in 2009 to replace outgoing Sen. Jim Isgar, also of Hesperus.

From The Pueblo Chieftain (Gayle Perez):

The frigid temperatures were ushered in with Thursday’s storm that dumped 6.6 inches of snow at the Pueblo Memorial Airport by Friday afternoon, according to Larry Walrod, a lead forecaster with the National Weather Service. “Most areas around Pueblo saw 3 to 4 inches of snow, while Pueblo West had 2 to 3 inches,” Walrod said.
Snow accumulations elsewhere in the region ranged from 1 to 2 inches near Trinidad and Lamar to 2 to 4 inches around La Junta.

Here’s a look at the NRCS’ efforts to measure snowpack and predict runoff, from Janice Kurbjun writing for the Summit Daily News. From the article:

[Mike] Gillespie and [Chris Pacheco] are the Denver-based snow survey supervisor and assistant supervisor with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. They have been doing snow surveys for 30 years, but the process — and its resulting data — has been of importance for more than a century in the West. It all started in the Lake Tahoe area, Pacheco said, where Dr. James Church realized that part of a solution to the ongoing water wars was to predict how the lake would rise each spring. In 1904, he established a snow course and began gathering data. Some of the first runoff forecasts were established in 1910 as text-based pamphlets that were mailed out to interested parties. “The western United States relies on snowpack for about three-quarters of its water,” Pacheco said. “As demand for water increases, there’s more of a need to understand the content of the snowpack … It’s a vital part of living in the West.”[…]

Municipalities and reservoir operators are also among those seeking information gleaned from the surveys, which includes snowpack depth and snow water content. The information is further synthesized into broader streamflow forecasts…

The Berthoud Pass manual snow survey is the first of the 2011 season, giving the first glimpse of what water availability will be in 2011, Gillespie said. It kicks off a set of more than 100 monthly manual measurements from January to May across Colorado. They’re performed by about 50 field personnel with offices in each Colorado county. The manual survey network nearly doubles the automatic SNOTEL system of about 110 sites, which take hourly measurements each day. The SNOTEL sites are generally higher in elevation and more difficult to get to than the manual reading sites, Pacheco said. Maintaining manual readings helps defray costs of expensive SNOTEL equipment as well as provides a way to verify automatic data.

When averaged, Thursday’s Berthoud Pass measurements largely matched the day’s automatic readings at the site. Pacheco said the snow depth was 40 inches, and the snow-water content was 10.5 inches. That’s compared to 36 inches and 9.3 inches, respectively, from the SNOTEL. Both data sets show the snow has a density of 26 percent, he said…

According to SNOTEL information, the statewide snowpack is at 134 percent of average. In the Colorado River Basin, it’s at 145 percent of average, while the Arkansas River Basin is at 102 percent of average…

“The northern part of the state has been above average almost since the get-go,” Pacheco added.

From the Cortez Journal (Reid Wright):

Ten inches were reported in Cortez, just shy of a 1969 record 24-hour storm that dumped 11 inches on Cortez, making it the 20th biggest snow storm on record, said Joe Ramey, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction…

The wet month, at 230 percent of normal precipitation, comes at the end of a three-year trend of wet Decembers. December 2009 saw 170 percent of normal precipitation, December 2008 saw 212 precent of normal, and December 2007 saw 278 percent of normal.