06d

• Board Meeting Date: 5/20/2008
• Description: CWCB Director's Report
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

NEW WHITEWATER PARK ON DRAWING BOARD FOR SAN MIGUEL RIVER - A
whitewater park on the San Miguel River is on the drawing board, and some county officials say that's
where it should stay.
Bob Gleason of the San Miguel Whitewater Association recently spoke to San Miguel County
commissioners about plans for a whitewater park on the San Miguel River.
San Miguel County open space director Linda Luther thinks it's a bad idea.
Gleason and others who want the park just need to work with other river interest groups, including the
county.
The park area proposed by Gleason is at Down Valley Park in Placerville, also called Applebaugh Park,
said Lynn Black, San Miguel County manager. She said the commissioners were generally receptive, but
questioned the location.
That area is already high-use, with abeach-type area for kids, soccer and other sports fields.
And it's difficult to separate the high-use areas from the land protected by conservation easements.
The web site for the San Miguel Whitewater Association at: www.sanmiguelwhitewater.org, lists other
possible whitewater park locations on the San Miguel River as Winnebago Corner or the Specie Creek
boat ramp. (Source: Grand Junction Daily Sentinel)
SNODAS UPDATE & RIO GRANDE PILOT PROJECT - Attached to the Director's report is a
fact sheet about the CWCB and USBR led project that was prepared in May 2008. The SNODAS project
is an adaptation of modeled snowpack data to Colorado that the CWCB has been funding since 2004. The
pilot project was funded at $25K and will develop products using SNODAS data for weekly assessment
and draw comparison to NRCS and West Gulf River Forecast Center water supply forecasts that will
cover the spring snowpack meltout in the Rio Grande Basin.
The Snow Data Assimilation System (SNODAS) is an experimental model recently developed by the
National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center (NOHRSC). SNODAS incorporates SNOTEL
and snow course data, satellite data, radar data and a numerical weather model to estimate snowpack
spatially at a 1-km resolution for the entire United States. Outputs include snow depth, SWE, snowmelt
at base of snowpack, and sublimation. Combining all the different types of data input helps reduce errors
and uncertainties related to each component data set and provides spatially continuous rather than point
data, ultimately providing an improved assessment of snowpack.
The CWCB, USBR, and RTi are working together to analyze SNODAS data to see if there is value added
to water supply and flood forecasts. There is always a temporal gap between the April 1 snowpack and
the observed flow and index gages causes uncertainty in estimating streamflows. This pilot project will be
to see if there is value added from analyzing and displaying SNODAS data and data from other sources to
track official water supply forecasts from May lst through June 30th 2008. Attachment 6d-04. (Joe Busto)
RECENTLY DECREED INSTREAM FLOW WATER RIGHTS - On February 29, 2008, the
Division 7 Water Court decreed an instream flow water right to the CWCB on Yellow Jacket Canyon
Creek in Case No. 06CW060 for 3.2 cfs (May 16 -October 31) and 2.5 cfs (November 1-May 15), with
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