Thursday October 17, 2024
CPR News —
On a hot August day, CU Boulder climatologist Peter Blanken and Ph.D. student Holly Roth cleaned a $50,000 weather station at the edge of Standley Lake to measure a phenomenon even grade schoolers know about: evaporation.
Evaporation is the natural process of liquid water turning into water vapor. As Colorado and Western states heat up, more water evaporates into the atmosphere, leaving less for irrigation and drinking water supplies. It’s a vicious feedback loop: Warmer, drier air triggers more evaporation, which creates warmer air, and so on.
“As the lake is warming, the atmosphere is warming, so the rate of evaporation will increase,” said Blanken, also a professor at the university. “We can’t fight that. It’s going to happen.”
Evaporation is a big deal because it eats into our declining water supply, at a time when the entire West is in a record mega-drought. The problem is that the tools historically used to measure evaporation are stuck in the 1900s.