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Water Supply Reserve Account -Grant Application Form <br />Form Revised May 2007 <br />3. For Applications that include a request for funds from the Statewide Account, describe how the water activity <br />meets the Evaluation Criteria. See Part 3 of Criteria and Guidelines. <br />This activity is currently proposed specifically for the North Platte River Basin, but the question of consumptive use <br />by native and cultivated vegetation is an issue of statewide interest and concern. The majority of Colorado <br />consumptive use goes to service the biological needs of irrigated vegetation. Weather conditions throughout the year, <br />the variations in weather conditions from year to year, and potentially changing weather conditions over time have and <br />will impact consumptive use of our State's water resources. Better documentation of evapotranspiration leads to an <br />overall improved knowledge of water supply and water demand -- an important goal for all basins and an integral part <br />of a comprehensive needs assessment. This has the potential for promoting greater water conservation and efficiency, <br />help sustain agriculture and provide useful data for many other water resource applications of interest to CWCB. This <br />project also stands to serve as a model for funding and conducting evapotranspiration monitoring statewide and will <br />support efforts to assess ET from remote sensing technologies. <br />4. Please provide an overview of the water project or activity to be funded including -type of activity, statement <br />of what the activity is intended to accomplish, the need for the activity, the problems and opportunities to be <br />addressed, expectations of the participants, why the activity is important, the service area or geographic location, and <br />any relevant issues etc. Please include any relevant TABOR issues that may affect the Contracting Entity. Please <br />refer to Part 2 of Criteria and Guidance document for additional detail on information to include. <br />This is a data collection project intended to give the North Platte Basin Roundtable, as well as the CWCB and <br />Colorado's water resource community, a better idea of how the weather conditions of North Park affect the <br />evapotranspiration (ET) from irrigated hay meadow grasses. ET is the consumptive portion of the applied irrigation <br />water, since it all is returned to the atmosphere and is no longer available to downstream users. Currently there have <br />been several years of data collection in the basin using a Class A evaporation pan in the town of Walden and a <br />lysimeter at the Refuge south of town. This project will considerably enhance the initial monitoring effort by <br />establishing a network of complete year-round weather stations to continuously monitor and report weather conditions <br />(temperature, humidity, wind, solar energy, precipitation and soil temperatures) from three distinctly different <br />locations in the Basin. Using well-documented physically-based techniques, the weather data will be used to compute <br />grass reference ET on a daily and potentially hourly basis. Three "atmometers" (small low cost instruments that <br />directly measure ET) will also be acquired to provide independent measurements at these same locations. The results <br />will be displayed, compared and posted continuously on a crop water use website managed and maintained by the <br />Colorado Climate Center at CSU. The results will be integrated with the ongoing lysimeter and pan evaporation <br />measurements to give a much more comprehensive assessment of ET in the basin than what is currently available. In <br />addition, seven additional atmometers will be acquired and provided to volunteer cooperators in additional areas of the <br />basin. A climate monitoring website will be developed for cooperators to input their daily or weekly ET readings and <br />then view the results geographically. This effort will yield immediate interesting results by showing how weather <br />conditions, which may be unique in Colorado to the North Platte basin, are affecting daily and seasonal patterns of ET <br />and how this may vary from one part of the basin to another and from one year to another. This project expands the <br />scope of CSU's ongoing collaborative CoAgMet (Colorado Agricultural Meteorological Network) and brings the <br />State closer to having a comprehensive statewide water use monitoring program in place. It also will provide ground <br />validation data for potential future satellite-based monitoring of ET. <br />6