Russ Schumacher, Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and State Climatologist, discussed his dual roles in academia and state climate services. His work involves climate monitoring, applied research, and providing climate services to state agencies and the public. He highlighted the 2024 water year as warm and geographically variable, with the Northern Front Range experiencing drought while the San Luis Valley was unusually wet. Schumacher emphasized the importance of soil moisture data, noting a new initiative to enhance measurements. He also discussed the challenges of communicating climate information to diverse audiences and the impact of climate change on drought.
1. First, just introduce yourself. Who do you work for? What is your position?
My name is Russ Schumacher, and I am the professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. I also serve as the state climatologist for Colorado and director of the Colorado Climate Center, which is our state climate office.I have the dual role of nt academic work- teaching and doing research and working with graduate students on research- and then this other role as the state climatologist. When I can get them to interconnect and integrate, that’s good and exciting, but sometimes they’re kind of separate as well.
As the state climate office, we talk about our mission as threefold: (1) Climate monitoring, keeping track of what’s happening with weather and climate around the state. Some of that’s collecting data through a couple of networks. (2) Climate research, especially applied research that’s relevant to Colorado and its climate on topics of drought or high impact weather or water, or things along those lines, or climate change. (3) Climate services, which ranges everything from public requests for data where somebody’s looking for a data set that that they can’t track down to working with state agencies or with other partners, like water entities, or ag producers or ag groups to media interviews.
2. What does your day-to-day look like?
Every week is a little bit different. Every day is a little bit different. Some days that’s spending a lot of time sitting down with my graduate students, and working with them on their research. But other times it’s meetings with our staff and trying to figure out the next steps on a project or something like that. Or when something big and important is happening in the climate, whether it’s a big storm or a drought is getting really bad, then it might be fielding media calls or talking to folks with the Colorado Water Conservation Board or other state decision makers. It varies a fair bit with what is happening in the weather and climate at the time, but that also is what makes it kind of exciting, because it’s a little bit different all the time.
3. Now that the 2024 water year has come to a close, what stood out to you about this past water year’s precip totals, as well as geographic variability and distribution throughout the year?
It was a very warm water year statewide, which was, and in line with it being an extremely warm year globally. But actually the previous year, it was also really warm globally, and we were a little bit of an exception to that in Colorado, but in 2024 things turned quite warm. If you look at the water year as a whole, most of the state ended up in a near average spot, but we always like to dig more into the details, because that’s where the interesting stuff happens, and looking at the nuance. That’s always the danger in Colorado is sometimes just for simplicity or for brevity, we use the statewide average information because it is interesting and there’s valuable information in there, but in a state like Colorado, you can really run the risk of just smearing out all the interesting stuff. You say the statewide average was this, but the mountains and the plains and the west slope and the East slope can be so different.
In the 2024 water year, especially in the spring and summer of 2024 up here, where I am, the Northern Front Range is extremely dry. But then, parts of southern Colorado were really wet. The San Luis Valley had among its wettest springs and summers that they’ve ever had there. It was considerably wetter in the San Luis Valley than it was in Fort Collins and Denver, which almost never happens. So those are some of the interesting details that come out when you look a little bit closer into the data rather than just, ‘oh, it was, you know, it was an average year for precipitation statewide’, which it was, but there’s always something more interesting than that in there.
4. Everyone is talking about the Southeastern storm that we got earlier this month, particularly because it was in our basin. I know you did a breakdown of the historical significance of this storm, but do you have any predictions on why this storm trended as it did (low elevation/southeastern corner of the state)? Do you think that this was an anomaly or an indicator of how this winter’s storms might trend?
That storm really was a huge one for southeastern Colorado, it’s not very common to get 30 or 40 inches of snow in one storm at the lower elevations in southeast Colorado. It’s not likely that another storm like that will happen through the winter. It is the fall time period, like October, November, when that kind of storm seems like it has the opportunity to develop. It doesn’t happen very often, clearly, but, but a lot of the other ones in the records in the really big storms historically for snow in southeast Colorado have been late October into early, mid November.
There’s an interesting historical analog from a huge storm in November, almost the exact same time of the year, in November of 1946. It was one of the biggest snowstorms for Colorado, and especially for southeast Colorado. And this year’s storm had a lot of similarities to that. But then once you get into the middle of the winter, like December, January, February, it gets a lot tougher to get the amount of moisture you need into the lower elevations of southeast Colorado. That time of year tends to be more where you’ll get more frequent snow storms, but, but it’s harder to get those really big ones in the heart of winter.
5. What do you look for when you are running analyses on both historical climate anomalies and studying forecasts?
The real value that we can provide as a state climate office is to know where to look for that historical data and be able to put things in context.And that’s usually what when people are reaching out to us, is that context of ‘ how big was this storm compared to other ones in the past?’ or ‘Are we seeing more of these?. There are a bunch of different data sources we can look to. There are the station records that go back. In some parts of Colorado, like in southeast Colorado, the CSU Research Station in Rocky Ford goes back to the late 1800s. There are a handful of other really long term, really high quality stations that you can look back at least that far, but they are few and far between. In the last 30 years or so, both automated equipment and transmitting data over the Internet has become more prevalent. Then there’s an increase in the number of weather stations that we run from our office, as well as the increase in Citizen Science networks that also fills in a lot of gaps in between the weather stations.
The stuff I really enjoy doing, though, is when there’s a big storm or something that is a little bit outside of the realm of what typically happens, it’s fun to go back into the the actual historical records, which the historical weather and climate records tend to be handwritten, sometimes in the beautiful calligraphy that people use back before everything was digitized. And you can really get into some of the nuances that way. Now, we’re sort of used to consuming data and just having it be very easy to find what the high temperature was yesterday, or how much rain fell, but when you can get that narrative of a person who lived through that snowstorm, and they’re talking about how it was whiteout conditions for for two days or the roads were closed, , that’s the stuff that really paints a picture of what actually happened.
And then, similarly, old newspaper reports tended to use a more poetic kind of language to describe the weather. And also because a lot of the communities, especially rural communities in Colorado, were so tight knit. Everybody knew everybody. And so they would literally print in the paper ‘this person’s farm had this happen’, or ‘Mr. So and so got two inch hail on their on their farm’. It is just a different way of thinking about things in the mid 20th century than with weather reporting today.
6. When media outlets come to you asking ‘Is this normal?’ or ‘What is changing?’, embedded within those questions is a lot of emotion and fear. How do you reckon with that when doing climate reporting in a state that is warming and drying?
That’s a great question. One thing that we did recently that has been very helpful was that our office led the third edition, the most recent update, to the state climate change assessment report, on the physical science of climate change and what’s been observed, and what is in the future projections. So having that as a reference is really helpful, but also we know that it’s helpful for people looking for that context in different parts of the state- what’s happening, what we do know about climate change, and what we don’t know about climate change. The right answer to those questions about where event fit into climate change, is that there are some things that we know very well are changing, like temperature, and then things that sort of follow on from changing temperature, like the influence of temperature on drought and and then the influence of that those droughts on wildfire risk, for example. Those things are fairly straightforward now, and the science has really developed, even in the last 10 years or so, on how do you know those dots are connected between increased temperature, meaning increased evaporative demand, which makes droughts worse, which makes wildfire risk worse.The evidence continues to get more and more robust on things like that.
Then there’s other questions that are still not really very well understood and also quite interesting and relevant. One of those is changes in hail in Colorado. We’ve seen some really big, damaging hail storms in recent years, primarily in southeast Colorado. There’s a very interesting possible climate causal web to try and untangle. There is the hypothesis that climate change probably is influencing hail storms. There’s some evidence pointing to that, but it’s not very well pinned down like at the local scale, and just the data on hail is not very consistent historically because someone has to be there to observe the hail storm and then call in the report. And so there’s a huge increase in the number of reports, but our population’s grown, and the ease by which someone can send in a report is much greater now than it would have been when you would have had to write a letter or something to the National Weather Service to get that report in. Then there is this other theory called the expanding Bullseye effect, where as population centers grow, there’s more things that can be hit by the hail, so you expect more damage. The same hailstorm will cause more damage now than it did in the past, because there’s more stuff in the way for it to hit. So there are all these competing factors, or maybe reinforcing factors to try and untangle when trying to study ‘what is the influence of climate change on hail?’ You have to also ask ‘what is the influence of population change or development patterns and all of that?’. So those are ones where it’s a little harder to say whether it is climate change’s effect or something else.
7. The US Drought monitor is often referenced in climate reporting. Could you talk a little bit about the monitor? What is the difference between drought and aridity, particularly as it has affected the Southwestern US in the past ~20 years?
For better or worse, the US Drought Monitor is this one map that gets generated every week. It’s really an incredible collaborative effort across the federal government, state governments, universities, academics, people like me, to depict the status of drought across the whole country every week, and have that be reliable and trusted. The great side of it is that it incorporates tons of different kinds of data to depict drought on the map. The limitation of it is that you really probably shouldn’t try to depict drought on a single map for a variety of reasons. There are different kinds of drought, right? Agricultural drought is very different from hydrological drought when thinking about water supply. Agriculture is very affected by what’s happening in the short term. If you have a couple of really hot, dry weeks in the summer during the growing season, that can have a huge impact on agriculture, but it’s not really going to affect your reservoir levels or something that’s going to be driven more by snowpack in the winter. And similarly, short term versus long term, can be difficult to depict. If you just got a storm last week, how do you weigh that against a deficit in precipitation over the scale of years? Averaging them together probably isn’t the right method either, so that’s where the challenges come in with the Drought Monitor.
The Drought Monitor is the convergence of evidence, so you’re taking together all these different kinds of data sets, long term and short term, and then trying to make one map that accounts for all of that, which, turns out, is really hard to do. That’s why we try to provide some more of that context. We try to explain that there might be conflicting signals on short term versus long term, and how that affects what it means for water supply, versus what it means for, you know, growing crops or or things like that.
We’ve built up this infrastructure to do the drought monitor every week, but then also, because I think it is so useful and trusted, it also makes it that that people kind of over interpret it or take it beyond what it can actually do, but that’s where hopefully folks like us can can help provide some of that context, or the or the background of, ‘Why does it look this way?”
Southeast Colorado this year is a great example because we were getting a lot of reports from southeastern Colorado through the summer into the fall, of just how bad conditions were getting, but those impact reports weren’t exactly lining up with the data that we had available. That’s also an important piece of this, is trying to line up what the data is showing with reports, because we don’t have weather stations everywhere. It can very well be the case that a farmer on a ranch in between the weather stations got the thunderstorms hit them. Especially in southeastern Colorado, in the summer, the thunderstorms are spotty. I think this summer, that was even more the case than it is usually. We don’t have nearly as much data as we would like to have.
You mentioned aridity. We know that when it gets warmer, the air is thirstier for water, which will tend to pull more water out of the soils and crops and everything else. And so it could be that some of that is having an influence as well, that the soils are not making use of the water as well. A lot of this is we’re sort of on the cusp still trying to figure out. This is the big issue in the drought field right now, is how to grapple with the effects of warming.. And what do you call drought? And what do you call just the effects of warming?