Interview Transcription
Interviewee: Nolan Doesken, Colorado State Climatologist
Interviewer: Zach Lewis
Location: CSU Foothills Campus Atmospheric Science Annex, Fort Collins, Colorado
Date: July 3, 2014
Transcribed by: Zach Lewis
Abstract: State Climatologist Nolan Doesken is responsible for tracking and monitoring weather,
climate, and hydrology throughout the state and disseminating that public information.
Following the 1997 Fort Collins flood, Nolan Doesken’s office helped organize a network of
volunteers and monitoring stations throughout Colorado to improve knowledge of local climate
and weather. In this interview, Doesken describes his experience of the 2013 flood events,
explains how his office interacted with disaster management forces to an unprecedented degree,
and explains (meteorologically and climatologically) exactly what forces came together to
prompt the 2013 disaster. Doesken stresses that events such as these are not unprecedented and
always loom in the “envelope of possibility”. In conclusion, Doesken recommends that we fund
and expand real-time measuring systems as well as embrace the communicative potentials of
social media in the future.
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ZL: All right, this is Zack Lewis interviewing Nolan Doesken, the State Climatologist. It is July
3, 2014. The time is 10:24 a.m., and we are at the CSU Foothills Campus Atmospheric Science
Annex. All right, thanks again for meeting with me, Mr. Doesken.
ND: Sure.
ZL: So, real quick, I just wanted to hit a couple background things. Could you tell me your place
and date of birth?
ND: Place and date of birth: Champagne, Illinois, January first—not January first, January
eleventh, 1952.
ZL: All right, we covered a couple other things on your background sheet already. Let me see.
What specific training did you receive to prepare you for your current position?
ND: [Pauses thinking]. Uh, I was interested in atmospheric science with a particular interest in
climatology back from the time I was high school aged and before and pursued a basic
atmospheric science training, not specific to climatology, in the early 1970s. And in fact, in the
early 1970s, climatology was considered a very, very dead and dying field. So, I was strongly
encouraged not to pursue the direction that I pursued [Laughs].… but…. So I did not get a lot of
specific climate training, I got overall basic atmospheric science understanding of the
atmosphere system, education at both grad school and the University of Illinois. And I had very
helpful summer employment for several years in the Midwest on a project called MetroMex,
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which was a Metropolitan Meteorological Experiment looking at the potential impact of the city
of St. Louis on downwind storm and precipitation patterns. It was very much an applied climate
project in combination with atmospheric research project, and it fit me very well and showed me
that I liked doing both and that took up several years of my formative early employment years
and grad school… and probably filled out my resume adequately that I was at least able to apply
for this job in Colorado, although my background was all in the Midwest, and the job
qualifications for the position I applied for—which was assistant State Climatologist back in
1977—was knowledge and understanding, and working experience in mountain areas and
mountain climatology, and in Illinois you don’t get that. So, I couldn’t quite put that on my
resume, but I had definitely been involved in data collection and various complications of
climate to practical world situations. And so I got an interview here, and most of my training has
been on-the-job training for 37 years.
ZL: [Chuckles]. That’s very cool. So… as State Climatologist, can you describe a typical day in
your field; what are your duties and what not?
ND: Our basic function at the Colorado Climate Center that I oversee as State Climatologist is
monitoring, which is either maintaining our own system or systems of measurement over time or
simply gathering data from other sources. We do some of each, so climate monitoring, gathering
data, maintaining it over time, archival access, analysis, and when I say that for example we
maintain the campus weather station by the Lory Student Center, where all the specifics of the
weather system are measured every day: temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction,
precipitation, evaporation, clouds, visibility, blah blah blah. All that and then we maintain
records over time. Over time you see variations, and potential trends, and extreme events, and so
one prime example is the Fort Collins weather station, and we have other weather stations—few
with as long a history as that ‘cause that takes us back into the 1870s actually. But, short records,
long records, but geographically distributed around the state, and from that we paint the picture
of what our climate is, what the averages, the variations, the seasonal cycles, and then the
extreme events and the potential or observed changes over time so monitoring is key. Research is
a component of what we do, which is taking the information we have and learning from it. And
our research is typically applied so not just a theoretical, very much applied to specific problems
which, for example, flooding or drought would be two extremes of the distribution of
precipitation, particularly keenly of interest to the citizens of Colorado. And so flood and drought
are two things we spend quite a bit of time tracking, analyzing, and understanding… And so
monitoring, research, and then service, which is sharing, making available the information and
expertise that we have to the citizens of Colorado and to the students and faculty and research
staff of Colorado State University and other universities. So, sharing the information so it’s
available for use by others. So those are sort of the span and on any given day it’s mostly me
sitting at the computer doing email, blasting, often blasting around climate information,
monitoring the systems that we have going, and then… just yesterday we put out our monthly
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report for the month of June for Fort Collins based on our historic station, and then the feedback
we get and answering questions we get from our stakeholders. It’s all a part of the day.
ZL: All right, what would you say is the most rewarding part of your work?
ND: It’s all, I mean this is what I love to do so all aspects of it are rewarding. The least
rewarding would be the administrative functions, the required reports, the personnel management
issues. The most rewarding is… seeing that we have tracked the climate over time, that we, and
that it’s important to people. I just got an email this morning from the state engineer’s office
pertaining to a farmer who’s dealing with a particular issue that, if he can prove that there was
drought conditions at the time and place of the situation that he experienced he will stand to
benefit. From the data that we have, we will be able to show quite clearly and so we very much
like it when we can help answer the questions that we get. And I also love, in terms of satisfying,
rewarding, is when we can speak to an audience and have them be, say, “Oh, that is
fascinating”—so when what we know and have learned about the climate of Colorado comes
alive to people who aren’t necessarily climate experts or even that cognizant of what’s going on
we can make it come alive for them then it’s been a good day.
ZL: Very cool. All right, so I guess we’ll start talking about the 2013 flood now. How did you
become aware of the severity and magnitude of the flood?
ND: [Clears throat]. Well, I can go back to moment number one. The week preceding the flood,
which was the first week of September 2013 was VERY hot, and quite humid, probably one of
the most uncomfortable first weeks of September that we've seen here in Northern Colorado… In
the 90's or near 90 almost every day, but the discomfort was the fact that it was also fairly humid,
which in September usually things are drying out and nights cool off, the days are getting shorter
so it's like okay so, this is feeling a little bit odd and uncomfortable and we said, “Oh man, we
really need some relief from this,” and we started seeing… several days in advance, a plume of
tropical moisture moving northward out of Mexico towards the southwestern U.S. and it was
looking like “whoa, we're gonna get a last surge of the monsoon—as it's referred to when the
tropical moisture moves into the southwestern U.S., summer and early fall—and says, “Ah, relief
is in sight, it'll be cooler, we'll get some much-needed moisture, this'll be great.” And then as it
got closer it was looking like western Colorado, Arizona, southern Utah, flash flood, local flash
flood stuff, and that was the weekend preceding the onset of the rains here. And then come, I
believe it was Monday morning, that would be September the ninth… there would be an email
from Kevin Houck, who is the flood guy for the Colorado Water Conservation Board saying
“hey, did you see the QPF—which is the quantitative precipitation forecast that NOAA1 puts out
daily for a five day period or a variety of different periods but I think we were both looking at the
5-day—says, “What's the chances is it that this can verify?” And they were showing eh… 3-4
inches of rain over a fairly widespread part of Colorado. And I wrote back and says, “It’s nice to
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National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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see we have a good chance of rain but rarely works out like that.” And he documented that email
so... and it's still in my sent mail folder. But he uses it in some of the talks that he gives as the
precursor for the flood, the conversation that we had electronically about the potential onset of
interesting weather…
And then there were heavy downpours the afternoon of the ninth, local thunderstorms in parts of
the Denver area and into eastern Boulder and southern and central Weld County so the moisture,
instead of being on the western slope, was shifting eastward, and we could see that happening
and says, “Huh, this is gonna be more interesting than we thought.” Still not thinking floods, just
thinking stormy, wet weather which we often get excited about because rain, storms, our water,
and water is beneficial in most ways in most cases. And then, so there was some local
downpours, some very local flash flooding, a few problems: Arvada, Wheatridge as I recall, and
furthermore we knew about it promptly because we track it on weather radar but we also have a
very enthusiastic group of citizen volunteers that are part of the program that we started here in
Fort Collins after the '97 Fort Collins Flood, as a response to that flood, getting people involved
in backyard measurements and sharing their data. The website that we're able to map and track
precipitation promptly… and we started seeing some of the heavier reports by Tuesday morning
the 10th, we could see, “Whoa, 3 inches in Arvada already, that's a lot of rain from brief
thunderstorms.” Saw pictures on the news of hail…
And then, then we just settled into cool, damp upslope. And you probably have heard if you
spend any time on the Front Range, the term “upslope.” It's when the air moves in from the east
and has to rise up the rising topography and anything that makes air rise will—by the laws of
physics—make it cool and if it's rich in moisture—which it was—it will begin to condense out
that moisture. The more it rises, the stronger that upslope, or the more moisture that's available,
the more potential for precipitation there is. So we were setting in a upslope situation—northern
Front Range in particular—from Denver northward into Laramie county which would be the
southwest county of Wyoming which was sharing in this event as well, and low clouds, dark…
soaking kind of sky. And our daughter had just arrived, just the previous week from two years
living in France, where she had dealt with lots of low, dark clouds and she says, “This is no
different that France! This is what I wanted to get away from.” [Some chuckling]. That was our
Tuesday morning experience, still no flood, just a lot of showers, damp, but yet the projection of
probably more rain in the same area for the next day or two.
So then came Wednesday. Again, other than the flood—local flooding in the Arvada-Wheatridge
area on Monday and some heavy downpours in parts of Weld County—so far, no big deal.
Tuesday still no big deal, just some gentle showers on and off, very little thunder, no intense
rains, mostly Northern Colorado, a little bit scattered in other parts of the state…. But the main
focus on the South Platte drainage. Wednesday, then things started getting interesting. And
beginning in the morning, and it's just as coincidence I gave two… weather station tours to
students at CSU on the 11th, and it rained in the morning soaking wet, but the rain stopped just in
time for the first, first tour that was. I'm forgetting was it 10 or 11 a.m., hour-long, students, and
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it’s more fun to give a weather station tour when there's interesting weather going on so, but it's
no fun to do it in downpour rain. And as it turned out the rain stopped, we gave the tour,
everything was fun and interesting, students enjoyed it, and then the afternoon it rained, another
little shower came in. Watching the radar, you could see the storms, not the storms, 'cause when
you think storms you're thinking thunder, lighting—no thunder or lightning, very little, none
here, maybe a little somewhere, but the clouds were all streaming in at a pretty good clip from
the southeast, and that is the prime direction for moisture to arrive… to… because the… it… The
source of high-moisture air that leads to the kind of storms that can result in flooding, is
generally on the east side of the mountains, the Gulf of Mexico. And when you get a flow that's
bringing the clouds just streaming in from the southeast, that's coming from the right place.
That's coming from the richest source of moisture, so we're all watching really closely. Are we
anticipating what was about to come? Still not, but we were aware of potential, very much so.
And the afternoon tour was particularly interesting. It was the… I forget the class title, NR 350
or something like that; I thought I might have it in my calendar still.... I should know because
I've given a guest lecture in this class every year for like 20 or 25 years! Usually in the fall, often
not quite that early, [jokes] not keeping my archive calendar drat! I don't know. But it's a, it’s a
lab class in natural resources for the Watershed Science, and it's a hydrometeorological
measurements class. So they go measure streams, streamflow, measure snowpack. It's all the
different measurements that are done, and it's a neat lab class, fairly rigorous they work the
students pretty hard, but again—one shot at seeing these students every year, which is in the fall
and it's a 3-hour tour of the weather station, and what happened to be the day was the 11th. And
the students generally are in that class because they are interested in the subject, not because they
have to take it, because they want to take it, even though it's sort of a time-consuming class. It
eats away at their schedules. But the, ah, you're going to hate all this transcription you have to
do, but if you're gonna ask me I'm gonna tell you, so, sorry about that.
ZL: Oh, no, that's just fine. [Chuckles].
ND: Because it was just fascinating, the juxtaposition of things. The rains ended, we walked over
to the weather station from their regular lab classroom in the Natural Resources building, we
talked about that rains are gonna be coming soon, we watched them all coming in on the radar
but we'll probably have enough time to get through the class, and uh, very interesting class.
Clouds hanging low, few little drops of rain now and then not, no big deal. But the class could've
run as late as 4, I think. But it's looking around 3 that the rain's gonna come up, so we try and
wrap up, and as we're wrapping up some of the students had— we talked about flooding and the
kind of rains, and that we were going to have some substantial rains, and the kind of rains that
we needed if we were gonna have flooding, and that this upslope situation that we were dealing
with was particul— that that was the kind of storm that would do it for the Front Range. And one
of the students in the class was a, had very, very sharp intense memories of the Fort Collins flood
of '97, and he and I, he stayed afterwards as the rain started to fall, and a couple of the other
students stayed afterwards to hear 'cause he shared his story of the flood. I shared my story of the
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flood. Do I remember his name? No I don't remember his name! You can't interview him!
Although we could figure out from the class roster. I wouldn't remember his name period
because I didn't really pay attention to his name, but if you could get ahold of the professor
who’s teaching it we could track him down. But he had keen memories of the '97 flood, and then
he told me he's always in the middle of disasters, and it turned out... this is 9/11, so we're talking
about September 11, and he happened to be at a hotel in Newark overlooking Manhattan on 9/11,
and he saw and experienced the, the twin towers crisis that day.
ZL: Wow.
ND: I'm getting goose, goose bumps right now. But we were talking about well, “Where there's
disasters, I will be.” And again he asked a lot of questions about the current situation and what's
going to happen. And to my knowledge I've not spoke to him since that day, but several others of
the class all remember, wow that was a fascinating. They'll never forget the tour, especially those
that stood around later to hear our last little storytelling, as the rain started to fall. And that way,
and it was like, “Okay, this is a memorable day; this is a memorable class.” And the sharpness of
the memories were cemented when, by the next morning, we knew that flooding had already
begun. Fort Collins? You know, it was sort of a wonderful soaking beneficial rain if you hadn't
been down by the Poudre River. Eh, Spring Creek was darn high. Fossil Creek was pretty high,
but they were not catastrophic flood events.
ZL: Right.
ND: The action on that evening, the 11th, was Boulder. And the rains started to pour. And they
had been on and off, but they started to pour 5:30 or so. And I can't remember when the first
fatality was, but by that, later that evening, the first fatalities had taken place, and… the heaviest
rains to begin with were right over Boulder, which the heaviest rains in the Fort Collins flood
event of 1997 was right over a part of Fort Collins. It's quite interesting to have the heaviest rains
falling over metropolitan areas. There's a whole lot of open space in Colorado.
ZL: Not particularly convenient but… [Chuckling].
ND: So, it could have been other places. But then, this way, the news coverage of the floods as it
was beginning was already dramatic. Possibly helped save lives later on as people started to see
the intensity of the early onset phase because this was just the beginning. The rivers did not peak;
there were peaks in Boulder and some other areas. St. Vrain, there were peaks later that evening
and early next morning in streamflow, but the main peak was yet to come, which was the late
evening and early morning of the 12th and into the morning of the 13th.
[Phone begins to ring in the background].
And so, we were aware of it already then, the evening of the 11th and then the detailed maps—
thanks to rainfall volunteers and the myriad of observing networks that by coincidence, not total
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coincidence but in this case, it was very nice that the heaviest rains were falling where we had
rain gauges. So we were tracking it closely as it was occurring. Urban drainage and flood control
district in the Denver Metro area, including Boulder County, tracking it closely. National
Weather Service tracking it closely— the Stormwater folks here in Fort Collins and Larimer
County Emergency Management tracking it closely.
[Phone rings in background].
It was not coming as a surprise it was nevertheless, coming at a larger magnitude. And that was
not because, I mean the rains were not as intense as many previous flood-producing storms.
What was different about this one was that they were occurring of moderate intensity over a
large area at the same time, uh, instead of the Fort Collins Flood of '97: high intensity, but small
area and shorter period of time. In hydrology the way you get a big flood is either high intensity
over a short area, or lower intensity over a larger area. And the larger area, you can have a higher
intensity over, the worst it gets. And, yeah, there was moderately high-intensity rains, but I don't
know that we saw anything of 2-inch an hour and only a little bit over 1-inch an hour. It's just
there was lots of hours, and lots of area—particularly the St. Vrain and the Big Thompson. And
also and in this case, I don't think we had a good handle on this immediately.
We could sort of tell. It made sense later on when we saw the data, but there was a lot of rain
falling at high altitudes. And in Colorado, historically the heavy rains, especially on the Front
Range, tend to be concentrated along the base of the foothills or up into the lower-to midelevation ranges, and elevations above 7500-8000 feet, the rains usually taper off, quite
dramatically. It's because the moisture in the atmosphere is predominantly held—it's a function
of temperature, it's a logarithmic function of temperature, and at lower altitudes you have much
more moisture available. And as you get higher in the atmosphere you have less and less
moisture available, and colder temperatures, but in this case…. Well okay, one more thing. In
many cases, most large storms that have large spatial extent, historically have fallen in the spring
months, and are often associated with colder air masses, at least at higher altitudes in the
mountains, so it turns to snow. This one did not turn to snow; this one was rain all the way up to
the Continental Divide. I don't know if there was... well if you could have seen Long's Peak,
which it did show up, it peeked out for a little while on Friday afternoon the 13th, and Saturday,
and I don't remember there being anything other than maybe a little dusting of snow maybe at the
very top. And that was... with big storms it's uncommon. It's usually falling as snow at high
altitudes, or falling less at high altitudes. And if you look at the gradient, it peaked at Boulder
Creek, it peaked right around Boulder in the very lowest foothills. And the St. Vrain, it peaked
maybe 6 to 7000 feet, but were still very substantial all the way up to 10 to 11000 feet, and then
finally tapered off as you got to the divide. Tapered off a little bit more in the Big Thompson
with its altitude but still had widespread high-elevation rains. And the Poudre, then it was getting
a little bit more back having the heaviest rains in the lower elevations 6 to 8000 foot range, but
still a lot of rain at high altitude. And we were able to see it as it was happening but we didn't
fully piece it all together until as we did the storm analysis after the fact. And we said, “Oh man,
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look, this is the heaviest rain, probably, in the recorded history of Colorado, at altitudes above
9000 feet or so.” And that, if you look at the two basins where the most rain fell at the higher
altitudes it was the St. Vrain and the Big Thompson, and which rivers had the most prolific
flooding? The St. Vrain and the Big Thompson.
So, we were watching this all as it was occurring. We were tracking it as best we could. We were
communicating, sharing data with emergency managers, with the State Engineer’s Office, with
the Bureau of Reclamation, with of course, the National Weather Service—all that. Those
connections are almost automatic. So data sharing was very good in the case of this event. And
then as the magnitude of the event became clear to all, and that magnitude of the event was very
clear by the morning of the 13th, Friday. When… for… I mean, I don't know… when I-25 has
been overtopped, both the St. Vrain, and the Big Thompson, and the Poudre…. Probably not all
three at the same time, I don't think ever, and since the existence of I-25, the floods of 1965 are
our closest comparison, and there was catastrophic, I mean I-25 was a new highway, newer
highway then, there was catastrophic damage in the Denver Metropolitan area and on I-70,
catastrophic damage east of Denver. Uh, so that was the last storm we go back to that had the
spatial extent and regional damage of this one. The Big Thompson flood of '76: wildly extreme,
more extreme than this one, but in a smaller area for a shorter period of time. Unfortunately,
many people in the path of that one. This one, again, bigger area, longer period of time, more
advance warning, more people were able to get out of the way. And so we— Losing 10 lives
doesn't feel like we did a great job, and I'm not in the emergency management warning
environment, but still it doesn't feel very good to know that ten people lost their lives. But
considering the magnitude of the flood compared to magnitudes of past floods in Colorado, the
loss of life could have been much higher.
[Phone makes noise in background].
ZL: That was good, very, very good actually; you answered several questions in a row. It's good
to be efficient that way!
[Laughs in background].
Um. Just real quick, to what extent did your office or agency find itself involved in
unprecedented or new interactions with other agencies also involved in some aspect of flood
management?
ND: Yeah, and there was one that immediately comes to mind, and that is we are not normally a
part of the… emergency management process. And in this case the state, uh, Colorado Water
Conservation Board emailed me and said, “Get on the calls. We want you to be on the calls.” Did
I have much to add? Not much, but was it helpful to me to see what they were doing and how
they were doing it? It was helpful. [Pause]. And I would say we are more strongly connected in
that way, and have the potential to continue to strengthen those connections. And likewise, our
monitoring systems from a climate point of view have never needed to be what we call “real8
time,” which is measurement taken and everybody knows the results. There's going to be a lot
more pressure now that our monitoring systems to function in real-time. And that will
unfortunately require money, investment, which we don't yet, we haven't yet received that to
complete the circle, but we know how to do it if we were asked and funded to make our
monitoring systems function in real-time, to make the data available for all entities as storms are
taking place.
ZL: Yeah, so….
ND: And there may be interactions that were new and different, uh, there were! Okay, other
interactions, uh… and I'm, the range of what I would call the Geographic Information System
community. And here on campus Melinda Laituri is the faculty member who's sort of been the
uh, GIS collaborator for many years and has trained many a graduate student to go out in the
world and be fruitful in GIS. This was the first time that we had any of a number of entities,
municipalities, counties, emergency management, the Denver Post grabbing large volumes of
data in real time to map on their GIS where they could be overlaying precipitation with all the
other layers of responsibility that they had, and so it was multiple entities that we were working
with that we had worked with in the past in other ways, but the first time we were pumping them
data to populate GIS for real-time emergency response and post-flood planning and preparations.
So that was another thing that we saw that we had not seen take place in the same way than in
the past.
ZL: Very cool. So what were the most important lessons from the 2013 flood, with regard to
preparation, planning, management, and recovery from water disasters? Of course, just from
your point of view?
ND: I mean, I will give my point of view, and I sort of answered it already to some extent, and
that is that we now know that having the data that we use climatologically for post-storm and
basic climate monitoring purposes could in fact have been more useful to more people had they
been more available in real-time. They were useful in the slightly time-lagged form that we had,
but getting it in an even more timely fashion could've been more important. Other lessons
learned— A lot of things went pretty well, all things considered. I mean I've been here. I was not
here for the Big Thompson Flood of '76 that occurred one year before I started work here, so I
didn't get to see, which was certainly a nightmare of lack of timely available information, but
knowing how that storm performed meteorologically—pkew! Quick! Hard! Intense! And on
what was very likely the most heavily trafficked day of history up to that point in time in the Big
Thompson Canyon because it was the day, leading into the weekend of the celebration of the
state's 100th anniversary. It was bad timing!
ZL: It really bad timing.
ND: It had been hot and everybody's heading to the mountains. Big celebrations, family
gatherings, it was, it was a nightmare. This was a nightmare in that it covered such big areas, and
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that was a lesson learned, which we knew climatologically was possible. Everything about this
storm in retrospect, we knew was possible. I have always known that September storms, where
we tap Gulf of Mexico moisture, and pump it up into the state and then interact with earlyautumn storm systems that have a little more regional scale, so it's not just going to be a summer,
local flash flood, and from mid-June to usually early September the floods that Colorado have
tend to be local, intense, possibly terrible but at a small scale, watershed basin area. And the
shoulder seasons, the spring and the fall, is when we're more likely to have the more spatially
widespread events, and this storm really was a little earlier that when we might think the big
widespread events are possible, but it was really within the window and the envelope of
potential. We've always known that tropic—if you're in the tropics, September is the month of
highest risk for hurricanes. It's got the most energy in the atmosphere. Water temperatures lag air
temperature. The moisture in the air is a function of water temperature, and so we knew the
potential for September is there. We just had hardly ever had to deal with it on the Front Range.
Had to go back to 1938 was the last time we had a significant September flood. And you don't,
most institutions don't have that sort of institutional memory.
[Quiet laughter in the background].
So I've been able to say, “See, it happened before!” And I've given talks on flood histories, and
I'll be giving more talks on flood histories, I've been to know that this flood, as unique as it felt to
a lot of people, it is still within the envelope of what we knew was possible. It was out on the
edge of that envelope, but it was nevertheless within that envelope. So my lesson learned is to
communicate the envelope a little better. I know that I had communicated, I had in fact multiple
times in 2013 said, “Just 'cause we're in… er… what has been a substantial drought period, many
of our worst floods come during and at the end of major drought periods. So be ready.” But being
ready and being ready are two different things. People knew about the potential, but the reality of
it is a little bit harder to grasp.
ZL: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so you said... are you changing anything about your data-collection
processes in the wake of these floods?
ND: We will be working on seeking more reliable funding and upgrade funding to migrate some
of our networks into real-time mode, which will require the cell phone communications that
we've used have not been quite up to snuff for what we would need for this application. The role
of volunteers continues to be above and beyond what a lot of people would realize right now.
And technology—every company will want to sell you technology, and technology is worth a
lot. But on the ground people seeing, experiencing, and measuring what's happening at as many
locations as possible is a very cost-effective means of gathering information, especially for poststorm analysis when we need to put the whole picture together. You can get away with less
information during the worst of the storm as long as you have stations in as many places, in
enough places to be able to see what's happening then. But when you want to analyze, “Well,
what really happened? And what's the connection between spatial pattern of precipitation and the
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subsequent hydrology that we experienced?” You need a lot of on-the-ground data, and that's
where the citizen participation remains very valuable. And then integration of data sets for
multiple agencies, we're never going to be running all these networks ourselves. Some of the
integration could be done better. There's multiple agencies; we ended up with a map of 2,600 rain
gauges in the vicinity of the storm, unprecedented, unimaginable a decade ago that we would
have that many rain gauges to track a storm. Several hundred of them were real-time, reporting
as the storm was taking place. Some were near-real-time, so we were able to analyze them within
a day or a few hours after the fact. And then some took some work over the weeks and months
following to put the whole picture together. But integration could be done better and we could
serve a function of doing that as the Colorado Climate Center. Individual agencies are
responsible for their respective mission. We could have the role of integrating the folks that are
more mission-specific into something that serves a more general good. So yeah, I can envision a
number of things that we can and will try to do better as a result of this.
ZL: All right. Um, so we hear a lot of years tossed around, like “this was a 100 year flood” or “a
500 year flood” or something like that. In your opinion, what are the odds of this amount of
rainfall or a flood like this occurring again, and how soon?
ND: The how soon cannot be answered, um, because it could be this year. Just because it just
happened doesn’t change its probability of happening the next year. It's, as I look, and we have
been involved in documenting as many of the state's biggest storms back to the first records of
major flooding which was 150 years ago this year—1864 when parts of Denver were washed
out, and Denver was mostly a camp of shacks at that point as opposed to a major city. And if you
know your Fort Collins history you'll know that Camp Collins and LaPorte was established in, I
think, 1864, and was washed out in 1864, and relocated to something closer to where Old Town
is now, a little higher above the river, still close to the river. Being close to the river is a good
thing! It's always been practical, beautiful; there's just something nice about being close to the
river until it floods. So giving yourself just enough margin of safety. Now I forget what was the
question you asked?
ZL: Oh, I was just, when do you think another flood like this would happen, but you were
saying...
ND: So I can identify historically over the 150 years that we've been looking… uh… five or six
storms that were comparable in some ways and one or two that were even larger but didn't hit
where there was quite as much population at risk. So I would, if you just look at it from a
probabilistic, over time, it’s sort of a kind of a thing that at any given point may be extremely
rare, but over the space of the area of Colorado, it's something that will occur, on average, once
every few decades…. And where few is defined as 3 to 5. The misinterpretation of that
information is that people then say “Ah! It will happen every 30 to 50 years, and nicely timed
between them.” NO! That, we can't guarantee.
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ZL: It's all just probability.
ND: It's a probability. And the probability, you can have 2 back-to-back; you can even have 2 the
same year. And then you could go 100 years before the next one. Big question in my field of
climate is, is changing climate going to change the probability of such events? And as such, do
we plan differently for the future? And it's a tough one, ‘cause we can sort of tell everybody that
the climate will be warmer with quite a bit of confidence 50 years from now. Telling you with a
lot of confidence that we'll have more big floods—that's a tougher one because precipitation
relationship with precipitation in semi-arid areas like ours is not a closely, as closely tied to
temperature. But I told you that the capacity for water vapor to be contained in the atmosphere is
a function of temperature in a non-linear way. And warmer, it's ah this sort of thing in terms of
water vapor potential in the atmosphere. And that's why you will hear people say, as a best guide,
assume the risk will be higher in the future because a warmer atmosphere will have potential to
carry and deliver more water vapor to whatever storm systems we happen to have. And the
situation we just had in September 2013 was as measured back to the late 1940s when they
began systematically sending up weather balloons measuring temperature and humidity twice a
day. That was the most water vapor in the atmosphere over the Front Range of Colorado in the
month of September in recorded history. There has been more in mid-summer: July and August,
for brief periods of time, but in this case it was for a 3-day period. It was setting the records
continuously for three straight day, and says, “Huh, well that's an example of what some of the
projections would say would become more probable as we move forward into the next decades.
“And I would say that it is good advice, from an infrastructure, planning, and for an emergency
management perspective. It's good advice to take that the probability of extreme precipitation
events could go up.
ZL: All right. That's really interesting. I've actually run through most of my interview questions,
so we can start wrapping things up if you'd like. Are there any topics that we've covered that
you'd like to return to for clarification or to add any new information?
ND: I've given you plenty I think! (Chuckles)
ZL: Nothing that comes up? Would you like to add any final thought relating to the subjects we
did not cover.
ND: Probably. Climate and weather tend to be viewed as, you know, hard science. But if ever
there's science that go directly to the human being, it's weather, climate, and hydrology because
we all are affected in positive ways and negative ways by the weather we experience day by day,
which over time is our climate. And then the connection between our weather and our water, and
so I just, whenever I think back on the history of Colorado, and I do have the benefit of, not by
my own blood relatives but through marriage, to have married into a family of eastern Colorado
homesteaders who'd lived the good years, the homesteading years of the teens and twenties
where all things seemed possible, and then the wild combination of the Dust Bowl years of the
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'30s, which also were punctuated by two of Colorado's worst floods—'35 and '38—and some of
our worst blizzards as well stuck in there. So whenever anybody tells me we've never had
extremes before, that we're having extremes like we've never had before, I say, “Have you
looked at history?” We've had some terrible extremes, and the extremes of the '30s changed
society, changed families. People had to leave, they had to leave. They could not survive that.
And so, we have constructed a environment that, with the help of engineering and management,
that we can live in an area that is beautiful most of the time, but will every now and then deliver
real slaps in the face. And they will come in the form of drought; and they will come in the form
of floods; and they will come in the form of fire. We know the forms they come in, and as long
as we have economic resources to continue to throw at them from an engineering point of view,
we will be able to live together. And the improvements that will be made after this flood will
make many places a little more resilient to the next one. But, there's a human-ness that goes with
this, and the stories that you hear and will hear in this process, that every event like this will
change somebody's life in a way that will not ever in their family be forgotten. And so I always
try to think of the people, not just the numeric numbers. I work with numbers. We get excited
about big storms, but the big storms we get excited about are sometimes storms that claim
peoples' lives or change peoples' lives. Just keeping that in mind, and teaching that to the new
generation of scientists and learning how to work with social scientists so that we learn the social
side a little better. That's an area where we have room for improvement. Learning from historians
is a good thing too! I used to hate history; what practical use is history? And I really felt that way
for quite a long until... I should not have this on record.
[Laughing].
ZL: Well, okay, we can wrap it up, I suppose.
ND: No, you can keep it there! It's all right, I'm honest. I can be honest about it. And then I
realized, wait a minute, a climatologist is really a historian, an archivist.
ZL: Yeah, that's really interesting.
ND: I said, wait a minute! I love history! I'm sorry for what I thought! And then when I start
seeing the connections between the climate and weather events that I have helped track, and have
helped archive and have helped make available to the lives of people and the changes in the state.
I mean every time there's a disaster something substantial changes that was hopefully for the
better, we usually learn from experiences, sometimes you don't but we often do, but we often
don't. [Laughs]. But, history is... I cherish it now and I want to be forgiven for the way that I felt
in the past. Can I have your forgiveness?
ZL: I hereby bestow my forgiveness, as representative of the historians. [Both laugh]. Well,
thanks, this was a great interview, I think. Just real quick, is there anybody else we should be
talking to for this oral history project, off the top of your mind?
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ND: You probably have him on your list already: Kevin Houck with the Colorado Water
Conservation.
ZL: I'm pretty sure we do, like I said I'm not....
ND: I'd assume he's on your list. Probabl— somebody from the National Weather Service, the
folks doing the operational weather forecast. They were the ones dealing with the calls that dams
were breaking, and they weren't. But people thought they were, and sorting out.... I don't have the
operational, I mean I'm not on the record minute-by-minute for what I say, affecting whether
people have to get notices t— to, what do you call it—to evacuate. Evacuation notices, although
we got warning 9-1-1 reverse calls that certainly woke us up in the middle of the night and we
said, “Wait a minute, we're not that close to the river, we're probably okay.” But the National
Weather Service is the entity that has to put those out. They were subjected to a, and it was just
publically released the last week or so, the National Weather Service assessment, which brought
in an outside team and did interview all of them who were on duty during those shifts and their
director, Azette Radelle, first woman director of a local National Weather Service office for the
Denver-Boulder area, who happened to not be in the office for that storm here, she was in
Cheyenne filling in for an absent meteorologist in charge there. So there's stories their
hydrologist… Triste, there are some very interesting names, is that meteorologist in charge Triste
Huse, H-U-S-E, who is the service hydrologist, who was fielding all the calls about failing dams
and stuff and sorting out, “Could this really be true?” and trying to get verification at 3 o’clock in
the morning, and trying to make sure that whatever messages they put out were accurate because
in this world of social media, and any way you can track in some way, and some historical... and
when you interview somebody involved in the social media aspect of this even, ‘cause this was a
new thing for how agencies both receive and deliver information. And while there's experience
that have been gained, and a lot of people have been taking courses on how you use social media
in situations like this, it's still a learning time. And I've heard the weather service talking about,
'cause they now have to staff for having a social media point of contact who's doing nothing but
social media during extreme events. And that's something that they never would have even
thought of five years ago.
[Noise in background].
And now it's like, is one enough? Probably not, you may have to have two people on staff doing
social media, and then finding that Facebook was more useful for a certain phase of
communications, and Twitter was way better for something else, and they didn't necessarily
know that at the beginning but they were learning it along the way. They were learning that
Facebook was more effectively reaching women; Twitter was more effectively reaching men.
That was what some of their post-analysis have shown. I know nothing!
I've just been fascinated hearing the discussions and realizing that this is history being made that
will be old hat soon. But it was the first time Colorado dealt with a major flood disaster in a
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communications world that was so different that they had ever dealt with in the past.
ZL: Right. Well, all right, those were all my interview questions. Unless you have any closing
thoughts I think we can wrap this up.
ND: We're good.
ZL: All right, thank you very much.
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