The federal government has allocated $1.45 million for Colorado State University to expand the state’s soil moisture monitoring network, a project that will help farmers, researchers, water managers and weather forecasters better understand drought and critical water supplies across Colorado.
The water stored in soils is one of the world’s largest distributed pools of fresh water and has a central role in sustaining ecosystems and enabling adaptation to climate risks. In Colorado, estimates suggest that the amount of water stored in soils is more than twice the amount that flows along the surface. Existing monitoring, however, does not broadly capture Colorado’s diverse landscapes, river basins and land uses. What’s more, compared to other agricultural states, Colorado has very few soil moisture monitoring sites in relevant areas.
“It’s like we’re driving the car without a gas gauge,” said Eugene Kelly, pedology professor and director of the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station, who is helping lead the work to grow the state’s soil monitoring network.
The new effort, called the Colorado Open Soil Moisture Infrastructure and Monitoring Project, will add more than 100 fixed-location soil moisture sensors at strategic sites across the state, focusing on four regional watersheds for which Colorado serves as the headwaters state — the Colorado, South Platte, Rio Grande and Arkansas. The expanded network will help improve drought risk assessments and management, water supply forecasting and wildfire prediction.
“Despite the amount of water contained in soils in Colorado, there are still a lot of unknowns around our soil and water dynamics,” said Helen Silver, co-director of the Integrated Rocky Mountain-region Innovation Center for Healthy Soils, which is centered on the CSU Spur campus and is a partner in the new project. “We’ve already spent a lot of time bringing communities together around this, really thinking about how we can serve the needs of a diverse group of stakeholders.”
There are multiple entities monitoring soil moisture in Colorado, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which operates snow telemetry (SNOTEL) sites, and the Roaring Fork Observation Network, supported by the nonprofit Aspen Global Change Institute. Existing efforts, however, primarily focus on high-alpine regions. The CSU-run Colorado Agricultural Meteorological Network, which has expanded in recent years, operates automated weather stations on the Eastern Plains and Western Slope capable of tracking soil moisture. Still, vast areas of rangelands and croplands are largely unmonitored, despite accounting for about 53% and 13% of Colorado’s land respectively.
“There isn’t much on the eastern plains, nothing in the forests, very little on non-ag land,” Kelly said. “If we better understand the soil moisture, we can come up with new ways of assessing fire danger, which would benefit land managers and municipalities across the state.”
The project will first look to expand the state’s monitoring capabilities by augmenting and connecting existing networks. The 18-month project will also identify potential locations for new sensors. The end goal is to have all of Colorado’s soil moisture data centralized and easily accessible by cell phone, with a pilot program operational by 2025. The project could eventually be expanded to other states.
The effort will also include a community science component. Russ Schumacher, professor of atmospheric science at CSU and director of the Colorado Climate Center, plans to gather additional information on precipitation, soil moisture and local impacts of drought through the existing Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow network. The network was started at CSU and has observers in all 50 states, including 1,500 in Colorado. The observers report weather information daily.
“Soil moisture is such an important variable for weather, for farmers, for water users — and there’s just not that much information out there right now,” State Climatologist Schumacher said. “Volunteer observers can provide on-the-ground assessments of conditions that can supplement soil moisture data, and we’re going to try to scale this aspect of the network up even more.”
In addition to partners across CSU, the Colorado Open Soil Moisture Infrastructure and Monitoring Project is supported by the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the Colorado River District. Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet helped secure funding for the project.
