The Colorado Climate Center, a partner of the CSU Climate Hub, has studied the climate and how it has been changing in Colorado for over 50 years. In 2025, the Climate Center team was able to take their efforts close to home through a project with the City of Fort Collins Utilities—one that they hope to replicate for other customers through the CSU Climate Hub at Spur.
The project began back in Spring 2025 when Alice Conovitz, a Water Conservation Specialist with the City of Fort Collins Utilities, contacted the Colorado Climate Center for local data on how the City’s climate might change. One of the reasons that Conovitz chose to approach the Climate Center was her familiarity with the Center’s local expertise. She was also a user of some of the Center’s existing products, including the Climate Change in Colorado Report and their monthly climate summaries.
Conovitz and her team were interested in applying local climate data projections, specifically changes to temperatures and precipitation, to a custom water demand model they use to predict likely future water needs for Utilities’ customers. The demand model results would be used to inform their updated Water Efficiency Plan. Existing resources couldn’t offer the geographic granularity needed for this project.
The Colorado Climate Center staff set out to see how they might translate global climate model data to a local scale. Assistant State Climatologist Peter Goble and Engagement Climatologist Allie Mazurek postprocessed an open-source climate projections dataset to provide the city with information that fit their unique timescale, geographic area, and data formatting needs, making adjustments as they collaborated with the City’s team. By the end of the project, the City had several “ready-to-go” datasets that showcased different scenarios of changes to temperature and precipitation for Fort Collins that they could use to take the analysis further. The Colorado Climate Center team also provided detailed metadata that documented their analysis, illustrated the data in graphical form, and presented the work during a lunchtime workshop to City staff.
While Colorado Climate Center relied on an existing dataset that was freely available for anyone to use, the data analysis was only one piece of their partnership with the City of Fort Collins Utilities. It was ultimately their local expertise with Colorado’s climate that made the partnership particularly beneficial. The Climate Center’s “understanding [of Colorado’s] climate and other factors such as varying topography” was a unique asset compared to many other climate service providers on the market, Conovitz noted. And while Conovitz and her team regularly analyze water datasets themselves, “having local data provided by climate experts [gave] us a lot more confidence in our water demand projections”, she noted.
“Working with Allie [Mazurek] and Peter [Goble] was extremely helpful to us,” she continued. “They contributed a lot of time through meetings, data analysis, and a summary report to make sure we received the information we needed. The data outputs were clearly organized, easy to understand, and well documented. […] We are so grateful for this support and are using the temperature and precipitation projections data regularly to inform water demand projections.”
For more information on some of the types of climate services that the Colorado Climate Center provides, check out our page on the CSU Climate Hub at Spur website or contact us about your specific project needs.
Article written by Allie Mazurek
Photo by Frankie Lopez
