Short Sunday School

This will be a short Sunday School session. I'm running late this morning and want to get out and do stuff. Anyway, our lesson today is to help you understand how to monitor "the bottom line" of winter snowpack. This "bottom line" is called "runoff." It's what melts into water and flows downhill into reservoirs. From there the water is carefully measured out to anxious farmers and ranchers farther downstream. They can't farm with snow but they sure can farm with Son of Snow--the liquid gold of runoff.

The Bureau of Reclamation manages many of the water storage projects around the West. BuRec produces what it calls "teacup" diagrams showing at a glance the status of reservoirs and key streamflow for any given project. The above graphic is Sunday's Teacup for the Minidoka Project. Minidoka is the one that includes Jackson Lake in Wyoming, Palisades in Idaho, etc. Click here to go to the actual site where the teacup is located.

The next trick is to determine how to know the overall status of various reservoirs statewide. For that you have to dig deep into the US NRCS SNOTEL website. Click here for a graph of key numbers for Idaho. As you can see, each impoundment has three key numbers: percent of capacity, percent of average and percent of last year. to see any state, simply change the last two letters of the URL to that state's postal code. For example, type "WY" in capital letters instead of Idaho and you can see Jackson Lake's figures. (If that's too challenging, click here.) I'm watching Jackson very carefully since we plan to spend a lot of time there this coming summer. The key figure I see is that it's over 200% of last year. That's a VERY good thing! With the snowpack upstream, there's no doubt Jackson will fill and spill this season. Muy bueno!
Above is an overview of the entire Western US water storage status. It's essentially the same for February 1 as there's been minimal releases and no runoff.

Well, that's it for this Stirring Sunday Session. Short & Sweet even though it's a long post here on El Blog. Next week, I can already tell you what we will be covering--how to analyze snowpack data to understand both the current situation as well as runoff probabilities and even more esoteric stuff that will put you to sleep. Have a great week and the teacher will see you next Sunday! Now GO PLAY!