Century-old snow tube still predicts Western drought
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- James Church, a classics professor in Reno, Nevada, invented the Mount Rose Sampler in the early 1900s after realizing that weighing mountain snow could predict summer water availability downstream.
- The simple device works by driving a serrated aluminum tube into the snow, extracting a core, and weighing it on a spring scale — the weight matches the water that will flow into rivers and reservoirs when the snow melts.
- USDA hydrologist Toby Rodgers still uses the Church Sampler at Stevens Pass in Washington State, where a storm this past winter caused a massive flood that wiped out the nearby highway for months because the precipitation fell as rain, not snow.
- On April 1 — a key date snow scientists use to estimate peak snow levels — snowpack was abnormally low across the entire West, with parts of California and the Southwest at only 17% of typical snow.
- A 2021 review in the journal Nature found the West could lose about a quarter of its historical mountain snow over the next 25 years as the climate continues to warm.
- Long-tracked monitoring sites are losing their snow entirely in some years, and snow scientists say they can no longer count on consistent conditions when they arrive to measure.
- Church's measurements above Lake Tahoe were so valuable that states and eventually the federal government copied his methods, spreading the technique to every Western state.
Why it matters: The Church Sampler is the foundation of an entire snow-monitoring network that informs water allocation for farms, cities, and hydropower across the West. With parts of California and the Southwest already at 17% of typical snowpack on April 1 and a 2021 Nature review projecting a 25% loss in mountain snow over 25 years, a tool invented by a Latin professor before modern hydrology existed is now the backbone of how the West manages a worsening water crisis.
