SnowEx Grand Mesa Meteorological Station Measurements

NASA SnowEx mission data comprises hourly meteorological measurements from five stations installed on Grand Mesa, Colorado between 2016 and 2017. The dataset includes air temperature, relative humidity, four-component radiation, barometric pressure, soil moisture and temperature, and derived snow depth, with coverage from October 2016 to August 2022. It serves as supporting data for field campaigns and forcing data for snowpack and hydrological modeling.

Use Cases

• Calibrating and validating snowpack energy balance models based on radiation and temperature measurements.
• Analyzing soil freeze-thaw cycles and moisture dynamics using soil temperature and moisture data from three depths.
• Providing meteorological forcing data for hydrological simulations based on the suite of hourly atmospheric variables.
• Studying spatial variability of snow accumulation and melt using derived snow depth from multiple station locations.

Strengths

• Data is quality-controlled, monotonic with erroneous data removed and missing periods filled with NaN, as described in the processing scripts.
• Covers a multi-year time series from October 2016 to August 2022, providing a substantial observational record for the SnowEx campaigns.
• Includes a diverse suite of co-located measurements (atmosphere, radiation, soil, snow) from five fixed geographic stations.

Limitations

• Column names and precise row counts are unspecified across all platform descriptions.
• Conflicting last-update dates exist between platforms (2026-04-10 on datagov vs. 2022-08-30 on nasa_earthdata), creating uncertainty about data currency.
• Data coverage varies between each of the five stations, which may complicate uniform temporal analysis.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) SnowEx mission

Collection Method

Collected from five fixed meteorological stations installed on Grand Mesa, Colorado, with raw data processed using publicly available scripts.

Time Range

October 2016 to August 2022

Freshness

2026-04-10 19:34:00.111794 (from datagov, but conflicts with nasa_earthdata date)

Geography

Grand Mesa, Colorado, USA