Item Detail
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27755
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0
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3
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English
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George Dewey Clyde and the Harvest of Snow
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Utah Historical Quarterly
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Summer 2016
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84
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3
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Utah Historical Society
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237-254
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As a dry summer and mild fall continued after a near-snowless winter in 1934, George Dewey Clyde pondered the inevitable impact of drought. Since being hire as an irrigation engineer at the Utah Agricultural College in 1923, Clyde had been researching and collecting data on snow surveys. The prospect of being able to accurately forecast stream flows from the mountain snowpack would be tremendously beneficial in determining for farmers the amount of water available during the irrigation season. Utah was predominantly an agricultural state, and water, as Clyde insistently emphasized, was its most important natural resource. Because most precipitation fell in the high elevations of Utah's mountains, the state's 24,000 small, irrigated farms were dependent on a harvest of winter snow. [From the text]