BOARD02022

• Board Meeting Date: 3/11/1959
• Description: Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

1353

before you is a proposal for a two year re-
search program to be conducted in three parts.
These three parts involve the following acti-
vities.

I

In the first part of this proposal, and
it is summarized in Mr. Garnsey's first page
summary here, the first part of this proposal
involves what you might call a study of the
kinds of variations that exist in the river
flow from historical records, to see how often,
for example, from the available actual river
flow data, how often, or how probable it is,
that a drought, for example, of given dura-
tion will occur in the river flow. Now this
is looking at past history as simply an exam-
ple of what future history is likely to bring.
If one looks at this problem from the stand-
point of the knowledge that we have of long
term trends in weather over the nation at
large, one sees that this may not be a safe
assumption; but it is the assumption that one
must make as the first starting point in going
into a program of examination like this. With-
out this information one is moving very blindly
in trying to forecast what the trend of river
flow is likely to be in the specific, say,
twenty, thirty, fifty year period ahead of us.
So that the first part will be to look at
stream flow data to see, for example, how often
a drought of one, two, three or four years'
duration is likely to occur, using this in-
formation, how abundant or how probable it is
that there will be from this information,
periods of considerable abundance. What is
the probability that the river will flow
ahead of a given schedule or how probable is
it that it will flow behind that given schedule?
So that part one deals with specific stream
flow data, going into a study of all the
scientifically observable information that can
be derived from the river flow itself and from
using this to precent in the optimum fashion
the information as a prediction based on the
expectation that the future will be like the
past, the prediction of the flow for the river
basin.

I

The second part of this study has the ob-
jective of looking into the much broader body
of weather data that have been taken in the
history of Colorado. Weather data of actual
precipitation, of temperature, of wind flow,