USDA Provides Daily Snow Conditions for Olympic Venues

RENO, Nev., Feb. 8, 2002–Whether you follow this year’s Winter Olympic Games or actively pursue outdoor winter sports, accurate up-to-date information on snow conditions is as close as your Internet connection.

Spectators and participants in the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games, can find out the snow depth and current air temperature recorded at SNOTEL (for SNOwpack TELemetry) sites near the Olympic venues at http://www.ut.nrcs.usda.gov/snow. U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) snow surveyors in Utah developed the web site and normally update the data every 6 hours.

"This technology not only is useful to sports enthusiasts, but it is critical to other sectors of the economy such as agriculture, industry and government. In the West, most of the available water comes from melting mountain snowpack," said NRCS Chief Pearlie S. Reed.

NRCS operates the extensive automated SNOTEL system to collect snowpack and related climatic data in the western United States. The system provides information on snow depth and water content, precipitation and temperature, wind speed and direction, soil moisture and temperature, and a variety of other weather and environmental measures.

A full spectrum of water and climate information is available from experts at the NRCS National Water and Climate Center, including near real-time SNOTEL climate information, water supply forecasts, state climate maps, historical digital data sets and climate summaries. A variety of reports–including daily snow and precipitation data, state basin outlooks, and monthly western snowpack conditions and water supply forecast summaries–are available at http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov.

An online Western U.S. Ski Area Report provides weekly snow-precipitation updates at ftp://ftp.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/data/snow/update/west/ski_west.txt.

Recreation enthusiasts are not the only ones who benefit from SNOTEL data. Reservoir operators, irrigation districts, cities, municipalities, and wildlife and water managers use snow survey and water supply information for a wide variety of purposes. Additional information is available on the NRCS web site at http://www.nrcs.usda.gov or from local USDA service centers.

#

< Back to News Releases