Friday, August 12, 2011
Water, water, where's the water?
Elizabeth sent in a question about creek flow that led me to the USGS database for Sabino Creek. (Warning! You could while away significant amounts of time playing with this data.) I ran a chart for Annual Peak Stream Flow, which is quite sobering.
Thanks, Elizabeth, for the great question.
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ReplyDeleteThe question was about creek flow - whether there have been other years when there's been no discernable flow in August.
The graph shows one data point per year, namely the peak flow in the creek for that year. (And I'm assuming - because I'm not interested enough to investigate further - that these readings are from the gauge by the dam.)
Looking at 1999, for example, you can see that the dot is basically at zero. That means that although there may have been rainfall in winter and during the monsoon, it wasn't enough to cause any flow downstream. If you look at the highest dot in this decade, that's from the July 2006 flood (again, I'm assuming).
Basically, the answer to the question is 'yes' - there have been other years without creek flow, although we can't say anything definite yet about 2011.