Posts tagged temperature
Boulder County to celebrate opening of Josephine Commons, named for a mine owner AND a human rights activist
Oct 11th
Boulder County, Colo. – Just one year after its groundbreaking, project managers, elected officials, and residents will gather on Thursday, Oct. 18 to celebrate the grand opening of Josephine Commons, one of Boulder County’s largest affordable housing developments.
The grand opening celebration will take place from 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Oct. 18 at Josephine Commons, 455 N. Burlington Ave. in Lafayette. Congressman Jared Polis and the Boulder County Commissioners will be among those who will speak. There will be tours of the buildings and property, and the public is invited to attend.
Planning, construction, and operations of Josephine Commons are being overseen by the Boulder County Housing Authority (BCHA), a division of the county’s Department of Housing and Human Services (BCDHHS). The county received a Certificate of Occupancy in late August for Phase I of the project, and had leased all of the apartments within five days. “The very quick lease-up is certainly a testament to the need for low-income housing in Boulder County,” said Frank Alexander, who is director of both the BCHA and BCDHHS. “It’s heartening to know that this project is helping boost the self-sufficiency and dignity of so many of our seniors.”
Phase I of Josephine Commons features 74 units on 3.4 acres of county-owned land in east Lafayette. This includes 70 apartment-style units in a mid-rise building. The 78,000-square-foot three-story main building also features a library, great room and large commercial kitchen. The project’s Phase II, Aspinwall at Josephine Commons, will feature 72 additional townhomes and duplex units for low-income seniors and families, and will break ground in mid-2013.
Funding for the $17.9 million Phase I of Josephine Commons has come largely from private investors through Low Income Housing Tax Credits arranged by the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority. Significant support also came from Boulder County taxpayers through $400,000 in Worthy Cause funding. And $550,000 in Colorado Home Investment Partnership (HOME) funds were provided by the Colorado Division of Housing. Other business support included a $12 million construction loan from Citibank.
Josephine Commons is named afterone-time owner of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, which once ran a coal mine where the development now sits. In the early 1930s, Roche stood out as a champion of workers’ rights, instituting the highest wages in the mining industry, fighting against child labor, and inviting unionization of her mines.
Also significant is the fact that the retired coal mines were used as renewable energy for Josephine Commons. Geothermal wells were drilled to depths of 400 feet, passing through the old mine shafts. Pipes were then installed to feed the heating and cooling systems, a process that greatly reduces the energy required for temperature control in the buildings. The project also features more than 100 kilowatts of rooftop and carport solar panel electricity generation.
CU-Boulder wins $1.4 million NSF award for climate change, water sustainability study
Oct 10th
The grant, part of the National Science Foundation-U.S. Department of Agriculture Water Sustainability Climate Program, was awarded to Assistant Professor Noah Molotch of the geography department. Molotch and his team will be identifying thresholds, or “tipping points,” of change in land use, forest management and climate that may compromise the sustainability of the policies and procedures that dictate the timing and quality of water diverted from Colorado’s West Slope to the Front Range.
Molotch said that in Colorado and semi-arid regions around the world, trans-basin water diversions that redirect water from areas of surplus to areas of demand are based on policy agreements and infrastructure operations made under climatic and land use conditions that may differ considerably from conditions in the near future. Measurements over the past 50 years, for example, suggest a broad-scale reduction in snowpack water storage in the western U.S. because of regional warming temperatures, a trend due in part to a shift from snowfall to rainfall, he said.
In addition, land-cover changes associated with population growth, fire suppression and mountain pine beetle outbreaks have altered the hydrology of mid-mountain ecosystems in the West, said Molotch, who also is a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. CU is teaming up with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder on the NSF-funded project.
The NSF award comes on the heels of a May 2012 agreement between water managers in Summit and Grand counties on Colorado’s West Slope and in the Denver area on how best to share water from the Colorado River basin. “This is a great example of communities that historically battled for water resources coming to the table in a good faith effort to find solutions to water allocation issues,” said Molotch. “These groups have no pretenses about the potential impacts of climate change and realize we can’t afford to bury our heads in the sand on this issue.”
Collaborators on the project include Patrick Bourgeron and Mark Williams, fellows at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, and David Gochis, Kathleen Miller and David Yates of NCAR.
A study led by Molotch published Sept. 10 in Nature Geoscience tied forest “greenness” in the western United States to fluctuating year-to-year snowpack. The study indicated mid-elevation mountain ecosystems — where people increasing are building second homes and participating in a myriad of outdoor recreational activities — are most sensitive to rising temperatures and changes in precipitation and snowmelt.
“We found that mid-elevation forests show a dramatic sensitivity to snow that fell the previous winter in terms of accumulation and subsequent melt,” said Molotch, also a fellow at INSTAAR. “If snowpack declines, forests become more stressed, which can lead to ecological changes that include alterations in the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species as well as vulnerability to perturbations like fire and beetle kill.”
As part of the new award, Molotch and his team will evaluate regional climate models in the mountain West developed at NCAR in an attempt to make temperature, precipitation and snowpack projections “more robust,” Molotch said. While the efficiency of water in trans-basin diversion projects in the western U.S. has in the past been enhanced by the natural storage of moisture in mountain snowpack that allowed for a slow, steady delivery of water into the system, warming temperatures are already causing this beneficial “drip effect” to be greatly reduced, he said.
If the winter temperatures are hovering around 15 degrees Fahrenheit and the climate warms by a few degrees, for example, there will be negligible impact on snowpack, Molotch said. But if temperatures hover near freezing, slight temperature increases can trigger earlier snowmelt, and precipitation that used to be in the form of snow turns to rain, significantly affecting trans-basin water diversion activities.
“One of the most interesting aspects of this project to me is the changes we are seeing in the ‘wildland-urban interface,’ particularly in Colorado,” he said. “There is some irony that Front Range people who have built second homes in Summit County, for example, may actually start to have an effect on the water they have relied on to be piped through the Continental Divide to the Denver area.”
In addition to providing land and water resource decision makers with projections on how future water supply and demand will change in the future, the NSF-funded project will provide a unique educational experience for graduate students, Molotch said.
“We have climate change, snowpack, changes in land use, all feeding into the pipeline that is bringing water to Colorado’s Front Range,” he said. “As the two main stressors, climate change and land use increase, there is the possibility of pushing the systems into an unsustainable state.”