Data From: "Warming and snow loss increase reliance on old groundwater in a Colorado River headwater"

Triangulating from the cairns…

Creators: Erica Siirila-Woodburn ORCID, Nicholas Thiros ORCID, Michelle Newcomer ORCID, William Rudisill ORCID

Year: 2026

License: CC-BY 4.0

Location: The East River (ER) is a snow‐dominated, headwater basin of the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) located in the western United States. The ER is the designated testbed of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC Accelerator Laboratory's Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (WFSFA). This portion of the ER watershed contains the project-defined boundaries of East River, Washington Gulch, Slate River, and Coal Creek, as described in the location metadata. Through WFSFA, observational networks have been established to measure stream discharge and precipitation chemistry. The ER is considered representative of many snow‐dominated headwaters of the Rocky Mountains. The study domain encompasses nearly 85 square km, a 1.4‐km vertical drop in elevation (4,120 to 2,760 m) and pristine alpine, subalpine, montane, and riparian ecosystems. The ER contains high‐energy mountain streams to low‐energy meandering floodplains and is eroding primarily into the Cretaceous, carbon‐rich, marine shale of the Mancos Formation. This data package contains geographic metadata for specific observation points throughout the watershed. Additional metadata on specific locations within the watershed are provided in the following related data package: Varadharajan C. et al. (2025) doi:10.15485/1660962

Temporal extent: 1911-10-01 to 2022-09-30

Bounding box: 38.820°N to 39.033°N, -107.120°W to -106.880°W

Publisher: ESS_DIVE

Tags: Groundwater, water age, streamflow, Upper Colorado River, atmospheric warming, CATEGORICAL:NONE water table depth, snow water equivalent, precipitation, evapotranspiration, transpiration, runoff ratio, Alpine & Subalpine Ecology, Hydrology & Watersheds, Snow & Ice, Geology & Tectonics, Geochemistry & Isotopes, Weather & Atmospheric Science, Mining & Mineral Resources, Field Methods & Monitoring, Data Science & Modeling, Gunnison Basin, Research Programs

Description

This repository contains the data and code associated with the paper titled "Warming and snow loss increase reliance on old groundwater in a Colorado River headwater," published in Nature Geoscience, 2026. This study seeks to answer how various ages of groundwater interact with mountainous streamflow in mountainous headwaters such as the East River. It includes various model-data processing scripts, primarily for ParFlow-CLM analysis of simulated water years 2015-2021, and two numerical warming experiments (+2.5 and +4.0 degrees C), including run scripts, forcing scripts, and post-processing, as well as comparison to observation datasets, detailed below. This data requires the use of R (.r, .rmd), Python (.py), Jupyter Notebook or Jupyter Lab (.ipynb), ParFLOW-CLM, EcoSLIM. Further information on the use of all file formats mentioned below (e.g. .tff. .nc) are provided within the associated scripts and directory where the files are located. Contents & Usage ASO/: Contains the bash and python scripts used to convert airborne snow observatory (ASO) data (ASO, 2023) in various data formats (georeferenced tiff file, NetCDF, UTM, and to latitude/longitude) then regrided to the ParFlow equivalent grid. Output data are in regrid_regll_data.zip and subsequently visualized and analyzed in plot_and_compare.py for Supplementary Figures A14 and A15. The wksht_ASO_comparison.xlsx spreadsheet is used to calculate the data for Supplementary Figure A16. EcoSLIM/: Contains the scripts and input files to run the EcoSLIM particle tracking simulations (/run_scripts) and the post-processing python script (/plot_scripts/eco_agedist_plots.ipynb). Jasechko et al./: Contains the jupyter notebook (Extract_Elevation.ipynb) to determine the outlet elevations of the 260 watersheds used in Jasechko et al. (2016), and the corresponding table, Table_S1_Watersheds_alt.csv. Used to create Supplementary Information Figure A2. PLM_Wells/: Contains the QA/QC-ed groundwater level time series of the PLM-1 and PLM-6 Monitoring Wells from Faybishenko et al. (2023), reformatted to water years used for Supplementary Figures A19 and and A20. ParFlow/: Contains the input files and run scripts to run ParFlow-CLM (/run_scripts), the python and tool command language (Tcl) scripts to create and distribute the ParFlow forcing simulation files (/forcing), and various scripts and intermediary files to analyze the model outputs (/post_process). SQUIRE/: Contains the processing scripts and intermediary files for the Surface QUantitatIve pRecipitation Estimation (SQUIRE) data (Grover, 2023) used to generate Supplementary Figure A18. USGS_Streamflow/: Contains the raw and gap-filled United States Geological Survey streamflow data (U.S. Geological Survey, 2026) used at the Almont station (site number 09112500). Gap-filling is performed in the R script with data from the Taylor station (site number 09110000). (/USGS_09112500_EAST_RIVER_AT_ALMONT_GAP_FILLED/code_almont_streamflow_gap_fill.Rmd). discharge/: Contains the gap-filled discharge data at the Watershed Function SFA East River pumphouse site (Newcomer et al., 2022) used to generate Supplementary Figure A13 and to compute hourly Nash-Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficients (NSE) in Table A4. snotel_and_flux_tower/: Contains the snow telemetry data (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2024) from the Butte (site ID 380) and Schofield (site ID 737) stations, reformatted by water year, accessed with the snotelr R package. Used to create Supplementary Figure A17. Also contains the flux tower observational data (FluxTower_Pumphouse_ESS-DIVE.ET_only.h.txt) from Ryken et al. (2022) and sap flux transpiration data (MaxB_Transpiration_5Sites.daily_sums.h.txt) from Ryken (2021), used to create Supplementary Figures A22 and A23, respectively. Raw EcoSLIM model outputs are in excess of 24TB, and are stored on National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and publicly available via the external link provided in the paper.

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Data From: "Warming and snow loss increase reliance on old groundwater in a Colorado River headwater"

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