Grand Mesa Study Plot

<p>Cleaned (quality checked) and continuous hourly records of snow energy and mass balance variables from Grand Mesa Study Plot (GMSP).&nbsp;</p> <p>GMSP is located in an opening in a pine forest on the northern rim of the Grand Mesa (39.050802,&nbsp;-108.061435)&nbsp;in west central Colorado at 3239 m.&nbsp;</p> <p>The site was funded by the USGS (poc: Jayne Belnap), installed by the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies (poc: Jeff Derry), and is maintained by the Snow Optics Laboratory at NASA- JPL (poc: Thomas Painter). The study plot is primarily used to&nbsp;assess the&nbsp;spatial variability in the hydrologic impacts of dust on snow (see Skiles et al., 2015, DOI: 10.1002/hyp.10569). Real time data can be retried from MesoWest (station ID: GMSPC).</p> <p>The study plot&nbsp;consists of a snow profile plot that contains a tower holding the instrumentation array. Tower measurements include wind speed and direction, air temperature and relative humidity, snowpack depth, incoming and outgoing broadband (BB; 0.285&ndash;2.800 &mu;m) and near-infrared/shortwave-infrared (NIR/SWIR; 0.695&ndash;2.800 &mu;m) solar radiation, and incoming longwave radiation values. Precipitation is from the nearby &lsquo;Mesa Lakes&rsquo; Snow Telemetry site (SNOTEL; NRCS), which is located approximately 500m north of GMSP at 3048m under the assumption that precipitation is similar at the two sites.</p> <p>Variables are accompanied by notes in adjacent columns to indicate if the value is measured, interpolated, or &#39;cleaned&#39; (i.e snow depths are set to 0 after the snow depletion date).&nbsp;</p> <p>Note: Grand Mesa was a field site for the NASA SnowEx field campaign in Year 1 (2017), and will be again Year 3 (2019). GMSP is/was within airborne flight domains.</p> <p>Dataset point of contact: S. McKenzie Skiles, Department of Geography, University of Utah (m.skiles@geog.utah.edu)&nbsp;</p>