Click the link to read the article on the Wyoming Public Media website (Kaleb Roedel). Here’s an excerpt:
March 8, 2024
In the early 1900s, James Church was a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. He taught classics, German and art history. Outside the classroom, he loved to be outside – in the mountains…That propelled Church and researchers from the Nevada Agricultural Experiment Station to build a weather observatory on the summit of Mt. Rose. Their goal was to better track snowfall and spring runoff data. In the process, Church developed and patented a snow tube he called the Mt. Rose sampler. It’s the device still used by Anderson and hydrologists around the world…Before Church created the Mt. Rose sampler, snowpack measurements focused on depth. His invention, however, showed how much water was in the snow and would end up in rivers and lakes…
[Adrian] Harpold says the snow science pioneered by Church does more than help water managers predict summertime water supplies for cities and farmers. It also allows emergency managers to forecast floods and droughts, which are becoming more frequent and severe in a warming world.
“The value of that small piece of metal that he invented is probably literally billions of dollars over the last 100 years,” Harpold says…
Church’s groundbreaking work in the early 1900s became the backbone of water management in the West, says [Jeff] Anderson, adding that “by the ‘20s, which is only like 10 years after he developed the snow tubes, it already spread to other states across the West.” And in 1935, after a year of severe drought, the federal government created a Western snow survey and water supply forecasting program, based entirely on Church’s techniques…A century later, newer technologies can measure the amount of water in the snow crunching beneath my snowshoes. It can be done automatically at remote weather stations called SNOTEL sites.
