Despite historically large releases of water from the dam, Lake Powell is still gaining elevation and is at the highest level in ten years. Apparently the “biblical flood” must have hit.
http://lakepowell.water-data.com/
Gavin says that Lake Powell drying up is proof of the accuracy of his toy climate models.
Lake Powell is looking good!
http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=1683648
All this fuss over a +- 0.2 ft change in a lake level? Who cares?
If it gained 0.2 feet every day for 4.5 billion years, the lake would go most of the way to the moon,
.6 degrees C over a century now that is small.
Did you notice that four fifths of the bars on the graph are negative?
Normally the lake is losing water at the end of july
So, what’s the relevance of an unusual year where the level happens to be rising at the end of the year?
The lake has gone dry just like the climate models predicted. No matter what happens climate models are always correct. We are all doomed. Only a denier would deny that we are doomed. 97% of scientists agree that we are doomed. Harold Camping was correct. It is all over. Evidence isn’t important.
@ rw…… sorry, I wasn’t here soon enough to prevent you from getting top honors, but you’re reading the graph wrong. 2004 would be the low-water mark, and despite the fact the bars are negative, they are generally increasing in elevation.
The graph is hard to understand if you one isn’t familiar with the Lake Powell trends/dataset because the y-axis should be labeled feet/day (I know…obvious if one reads the title of the graph, but many people don’t!) Just being labeled “feet” makes one think of depth anomalies or something.
-Scott
I don’t get it…..
Lake Powell is still ~40 ft below pool…
…they are letting out a lot more water then they are required to let out
The danger of flooding is over….
Why are they not letting it just fill up??
They are adding water to Lake Mead, which is very low.
I didn’t think of that, thanks!
“dangerous see level rice” at lake powell?
Somewhere, Harold Camping is chuckling to himself…
Just as a side-note…they actually had to plan things out. They are letting Lake Meade take a huge amount of water since it is low, but this is to keep Lake Powell from also filling up which it would have if they had been letting out their normal amounts of water all season long.
To put it into perspective, they normally let out 3 times less water then they are now. Lake Meade is similar, they are also letting out huge amounts of water. (I think they are letting out twice as much as usual, its been awhile since I looked at Lake Meade…) But in any regard, this is rather severe as despite the huge amount of water they are releasing, Lake Powell is still at its highest level in over 10 years.
This is what happens when flood control is done correctly in my view. There is a little flooding all the way down at the end of the Colorado River (near Mexico) but overall the river is just slightly up everywhere else as the flood control is working great.
Lake Powell and Lake Meade will mostly fill up this year. It appears that by mid-August probably Lake Powell will have maxed out for the year (which is a month or two later then usual) and other dams will have their lakes filled as well or at least close enough to really shine so to speak. There is quite a few dams on this stretch and this year has been rather brisk for any mountain based river system.
In my line of thinking, its too bad they did not control the Mississippi and Missouri like they control the Colorado…because this year’s flood were rather harsh and they still did a great job of keeping terrible flooding from happening along the Colorado.
benfrommo,
Thanks for the instructive update. This really is some of the best news all year in the weather/climate world IMHO. Funny how you don’t hear much about it in the media.
Oh, and you have a cool blog – it’s bookmarked now.
Here is some graphs of Lake Powell and Lake Meade water levels:
http://graphs.water-data.com/lakepowell/
http://graphs.water-data.com/lakemead/
I am a little surprised that the AGW salesmen didn’t use a picture of ‘Lake’ Powell before the dam was built, just for added effect.
And isn’t all this water hoarding part of a sinister plot to mask the acceleration of sea level rise?
In any case, as Ed Darrell once explained, this is all due to ‘lake effect’ snow.
I still wonder how much of this is really just lake bottom rebound? Has anyone checked with the University of Colorado on this? Do we subtract 3mm per day?