GOTHIC, Colo. (AP) — Four miles from the nearest plowed road in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, a 73-year-old man with a flowing gray beard and two hips replaced trudged across his front yard to measure a year’s worth of fresh snow. Mid-March day.
Billy Barr first began recording snow and weather data more than 50 years ago as a Rutgers University environmental science graduate in Gothic, Colorado, near the headwaters of the Colorado River.
Bored and wanting to keep busy, he equipped himself with primitive equipment and logged a few centimeters of fresh snow each day, just as he had logged gas station marks on family road trips as a child.
Unpaid but driven by compelling curiosity and a preference for spending more than half the year skiing rather than walking, Barr remained and continued to measure snowfall day after day, winter after winter.
His faithful measurements long ago revealed something he never expected: As the Earth warms, snow is arriving later and disappearing earlier. It’s a troubling sign for millions of people in the drought-stricken Southwest who rely on the slow melting of mountain snowpack over spring and summer to provide a steady flow of water for cities, agriculture and ecosystems.
“Snow is a physical form of a water reservoir, and if there isn’t enough of it, it will be lost,” Barr said.
So-called “citizen scientists” have long played a role in observing plants and counting wildlife to help researchers better understand the environment.
Although Barr is modest about his own contributions, handwritten snow data once published on his website have informed numerous scientific papers and helped calibrate airborne snow detection instruments. And its data continues to grow with each passing year.
“Anybody can do it,” the cocky bachelor said in a toned-down Jersey accent. “Being socially awkward made me capable of doing this for 50 years, but anyone can sit there and watch something like this.”
Two winters ago, Barr’s legs began buckling with unnerving frequency while he was skiing gentle loops through spruce trees looking for animal tracks, another data point he collected. He feared it might be his last year at Gothic, a former mining town turned into a research facility for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory; where she worked full-time for decades and is now a part-time accountant.
“I was running out of time to live here,” he said. “So I had hip replacement surgery to extend this time.”
Two hip replacement surgeries provided an extended lease on living at high altitude. Barr did more cross-country skiing last December than he did all of last winter.
“Unless something else goes wrong, which it will, but as long as it’s not serious, I think I can last here for a while longer,” he said.
Many things can go wrong. Barr was sitting on a bench next to his research laboratory on an unseasonably warm March day when a heavy layer of snow slid off the roof, throwing the bench forward and nearly causing it to fall.
Although not all risks are preventable, some can be. If the ski slope is very icy, he will walk parallel on the untracked snow to get better footing. He grows his produce in a greenhouse attached to his home, and most of the nonperishable produce he stocked last fall is organic. He wears a mask when he’s around others indoors.
“There’s no way I could get a respiratory illness at this altitude,” he said.
For Barr, longevity means devoting more time to the quiet mountain lifestyle he enjoys in his rustic two-room home, heated by passive solar power and a wood stove. He uses a composting toilet and relies on solar panels to heat water, do laundry and enable him to watch movies at night.
When he eventually retires from the mountains, Barr hopes to continue much of his long-running weather collection remotely.
He has been testing remote vehicles for five years, trying to calibrate them based on his old but reliable techniques. He thinks he needs a few more years of testing before he can trust the new tools, and even then he fears equipment failure.
For now, he measures snow using his own tried-and-true method:
Around 4 p.m., he walks uphill from his home to a flat, square board painted white and sticks a metal ruler on the accumulated snow to measure its depth. He then pushes a clear box upside down into the snow, uses a metal plate to scrape off the rest of the snow, then slides the cover under the box to help turn it over. He weighs the snow by subtracting it from the weight of the blood box, which allows him to calculate its water content.
So far, manual measurement remains the best method, scientists say. Automated snow measurements introduce a degree of uncertainty, such as how wind spreads snow unevenly across the landscape, explained Ben Pritchett, senior forecaster for the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
“There is no substitute for observing snow in person to understand how it changes,” Pritchett said.
But Barr’s data collection was always unpaid volunteer work, complicating any succession plans when he eventually leaves his Gothic home.
“If environmental science were funded the way we fund cancer research or other efforts, we would certainly continue this research and data collection,” said Ian Billick, managing director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. “It would be very valuable.”
The lab has winter handlers who can ski the half-mile (0.8 kilometers) to Barr’s home to manually measure new snow in the same area using the same method, but someone will still have to foot the bill for their time.
Barr is well aware that his humble weather station is a snapshot of the Colorado River basin, and that satellites, lasers and computer models can now calculate how much snow has fallen basinwide and predict the resulting runoff. But local scientists say some of these models would not be as accurate without his work.
Ecologist Ian Breckheimer of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory measures snow from space using satellites. Given the distance, Breckheimer needed data on the ground to calibrate his model.
“Billy’s data provides this fundamental truth,” Breckheimer said. “We know their data is accurate. That means we can compare anything we think we can see with things we know are accurate.”
Between measuring snow and noting animal sightings, Barr created a body of work that no one asked him to put together and that never made him a dime.
Although it inspired scientists working in the nearby mountainside laboratory, Barr said he began measuring snowfall out of a desire to engage with the world around him. He felt out of place in the city and suffocated by social expectations.
“I didn’t follow anything and that doesn’t make me a traitor,” he said. “You have to look for what will work for you. “Sometimes that means trying different things and going to different places.”
Barr hopes that just as he envisions a lifestyle that goes against social norms, the high-tech water forecasting tools scientists have today will lead to unconventional solutions for rationing the dwindling resource.
“This could lead to consequences like we can no longer have green grass in the middle of Arizona, because that’s not a good use of a limited water resource,” Barr said. “And water is more valuable than gold.”
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