Friday, March 02, 2007

Wash that snow away...


Mid-afternoon update shows the Delaware River at Riegelsville rose SIX FEET today, but it is showing signs of leveling off at 10' which is no where near the 22' flood stage.

Upriver tributaries such as the Lackawaxen River and Lehigh River are not all that high. The Musconetcong River is beginning to fall just short of its 6' flood stage.

Most places in the upper watershed received between one and two inches of rain. Some of the snow pack is melting off and the river ice probably isn't budging yet. Let's hope for some warm sunny days to melt off the frozen water that still covers the landscape in the Poconos and Catskill Mountains.

As the above AccuWeather maps show, March is usually the stormiest month of any given year, in like a lion and out like a lamb. At this moment it is playing lion role perfectly.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi John,

Read the update and the mention of the Musky's 6' flood stage jogged my memory about the stream monitoring we have been doing. One of the criteria is how frequently the Musky floods. The rating scale is:
10 - flooding every 1.5-2 years
7 - flooding every 3-5 years
3 - flooding every 6-10 years
1 - no flooding

I typically keep my gage settings at the 7 day setting and know it can be changed to up to 31 days of data, but can you go back a month at a time or a year at a time to see how frequently the Musky topped 6' ? Maybe you have a good handle from past experience.

Thanks,

Eric

Anonymous said...

looking at the entire flow history on the stream gage site.

look between the cfs and feet and see "summary of additional data for this site"

then check out peak stream flow. somewhere around 3000 cfs is flood stage. it is a broad brush but interesting nonetheless

BJ said...

i didnt think it would flood. unfortunately, we have ill-informed people in the media (et)who like to write scare-mongering articles.