Citizen scientist studies the snow
— Six kilometres from the nearest plowed road high in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, a 73-year-old man with a billowing grey beard and two replaced hips trudged through his front yard to measure fresh snow that fell during one mid-March day.
Billy Barr first began recording snow and weather data more than 50 years ago as a freshly minted Rutgers University environmental science graduate in Gothic, Colorado, near part of the Colorado River’s headwaters.
Bored and looking to keep busy, he had rigged rudimentary equipment and each day had jotted the inches of fresh snow, just as he had logged gas station brands as a child on family road trips.
Unpaid but driven by compulsive curiosity and a preference for spending more than half the year on skis rather than on foot, Barr stayed here and kept measuring snowfall day after day, winter after winter.
His faithful measurements revealed something he never expected long ago: snow is arriving later and disappearing earlier as the world warms. That’s a concerning sign for millions of people in the drought-stricken Southwest who rely on mountain snowpack to slowly melt throughout spring and summer to provide a steady stream of water for cities, agriculture and ecosystems.
“Snow is a physical form of a water reservoir, and if there’s not enough of it, it’s gone,” Barr said.
So-called “citizen scientists” have long played roles in making observations about plants and counting wildlife to help researchers better understand the environment.
Barr is modest about his own contributions, although the oncehandwritten snow data published on his website has informed numerous scientific papers and helped calibrate aerial snow sensing tools. And with each passing year, his data continues to grow.
“Anybody could do it,” said the self-deprecating bachelor with a softened Jersey accent. “Being socially inept made me so I could do it for 50 years, but anyone can sit there and watch something like that.”
When he eventually retires from the mountains, Barr hopes to continue most of his long-running weather collection remotely.
He has been testing remote tools for five years, trying to calibrate them to his dated but reliable techniques. He figures it will take a few more years of testing before he’ll trust the new tools and, even then, fears equipment failure.
Just as he engineered a lifestyle that bucks societal norms, Barr hopes the high-tech water forecasting tools scientists have today will lead to unconventional solutions for rationing the dwindling resource.