This page looks at the Upper Colorado River Basin from the station level instead of the basin-average level. It asks two related questions: what does the station-level snowpack distribution look like on a given water-year date, and how does that distribution evolve through the season when binned into elevation bands?
How to use this chart
The top chart plots raw station WTEQ values against station elevation on the selected date. The lower heatmaps show where snowpack is building and melting through the full water year after those same stations are summarized into 500-foot elevation bands.
Controls
Years
The year chips toggle 2002, 2018, 2021, 2023, 2025, and 2026 on and off. They also serve as the legend for the scatterplot points and the synced date markers in the heatmaps.
Date
The date slider moves through the water year from Oct 1 to Sep 30. Play animates that same slider so the station scatterplot and heatmaps move together through the season.
Interpretation
This is a station-elevation view, not an area-weighted snow model. It is most useful for comparing shape, timing, and the vertical distribution of snowpack between years.
Snowpack by Elevation
Data Sources
- USDA NRCS / NWCC AWDB station metadata and station-level
POR/WTEQplots, fetched into a local Upper Colorado River Basin station inventory and water-year files.123456789
- 1
USDA NRCS / NWCC AWDB - all-stations metadata JSON. ↩︎
- 2
USDA NRCS / NWCC AWDB - station-level POR/WTEQ plot directory. ↩︎
- 3
Derived local station inventory used by this chart - powell-snow-stations-meta.json. ↩︎
- 4
Derived local water-year station WTEQ dataset - powell-snow-stations-wteq-wy2002.json. ↩︎
- 5
Derived local water-year station WTEQ dataset - powell-snow-stations-wteq-wy2018.json. ↩︎
- 6
Derived local water-year station WTEQ dataset - powell-snow-stations-wteq-wy2021.json. ↩︎
- 7
Derived local water-year station WTEQ dataset - powell-snow-stations-wteq-wy2023.json. ↩︎
- 8
Derived local water-year station WTEQ dataset - powell-snow-stations-wteq-wy2025.json. ↩︎
- 9
Derived local water-year station WTEQ dataset - powell-snow-stations-wteq-wy2026.json. ↩︎