Graph of the Day: Lake Mead Daily Water Levels, 2009 – February 2011
Wet Desert Expeditions
7 February 2011 Every year around this time I start to hear comments along the lines of “I heard the lake is supposed to go up 20 feet this winter” or “I was at the lake this weekend and it was up 10 feet!” I call this period the Winter Bump, where for a couple of months our hand-wringing and pessimism give way to optimism that maybe this year is going to be different and Lake Mead will actually gain water and this drought will at least stall a little if not actually start to turn around. If the Bureau of Reclamation is to be believed, it just might. Every couple days I check in with this running trend of Lake Mead’s water level over the last three water years, and you can clearly see that every year around this time we get a little bump which is followed by a steep drop through spring and summer. This graph only shows the last three years but it has been a fairly consistent net loss of 10-12ft. for the last handful of years before that. The blue line has a nice sharp rise this year and it’s still going up, so maybe this year will be the first time in almost a decade the blue line will touch the red line. I don’t think it will, but then I’m a grumpy water pessimist. And even if we do see the reservoir rise this year, as long as the planet continues to warm (which means snow melts and then evaporates before it reaches the river basins) and we continue to flood the deserts of California to grow alfalfa, we still have a problem. So enjoy the bump and keep your fingers crossed that this is the year it all turns around, just keep your eye on that graph and look at real numbers before you get too excited.
