Identification

Title

Earth, wind, and fire: Are Boulderâ€™s extreme downslope winds changing?

Abstract

A Denver newspaper in 2016 reported that a new Colorado all-time record peak wind gust of 148 mph was recorded on 18 February 2016, on Monarch Pass in the Colorado Rockies near 11 000 ft above sea level. The article stated that this broke the previous record of 147 mph set on 25 January 1971 at the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Laboratory, at an altitude of 6077 ft, on the western edge of Boulder, Colorado. Though there is no actual official peak gust record in Colorado, this raised the issue that Boulder had not recently experienced winds of the magnitude of the megadownslope windstorms that wracked the area in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when extreme wind gusts recorded at the NSF NCAR Mesa Laboratory were not unusual. Due to Boulder’s location at the eastern foot of a north–south mountain range ( Earth ), it is susceptible to destructive downslope winds ( wind ) often accompanied by fires ( fire ) such as the downslope wind-driven Marshall Fire just east of Boulder on 30 December 2021 that destroyed nearly 1100 homes. But after the 1990s, the weather station anemometer at NSF NCAR did not record a peak gust much over 100 mph. What changed? This detective story describes the search for causes of the apparent decrease in strength of extreme windstorms at NSF NCAR and their impacts in the Boulder area. The suspects in Boulder include a change in instrument location, changes in building codes, and increasing roughness length from tree growth. But climate change emerges as a chief culprit.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d74x5d7p

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2025-07-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact