Comments on: 2007 barely escapes being Atlanta’s driest year ever

By: GThierry

GThierry — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:50:42 +0000

Dr. Jeff Masters has an article on what caused the drought and what to expect in the future on his blog:

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=886&tstamp=200801

By: mickey

mickey — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:13:43 +0000

Great! Just e-mail it to me when it’s ready. Thanks.

By: rkolter

rkolter — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:42:27 +0000

Mickey - Yes, I’d be willing to do a guest post about it. I’ve put my best guess up in the predictions page too. Let me write something up, may take a couple days.

By: Lily

Lily — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 22:58:06 +0000

There should not be so much water released down stream until the water is back to normal. No there were no releases because of mangling by alabama’s gov

By: RichS

RichS — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:52:16 +0000

Rkolter - Going way back up to your math at the top of this string, I will also point out that June 1st isn’t necessarily the peak of the lake levels. You show a four foot gain last spring, but the lake had already dropped two feet off of it’s peak by June 1st. If you used the actual peak last spring you would have come up with more like six feet. And that was during the drought. So we do certainly have hope for significant recharge during the winter / spring.

I think my difference with some others on this forum is that if we got say eight feet of recharge, I would consider that the problem has gotten worse not better. I would consider a ten foot gain to be basically breaking even - just buying time for the drought to hopefully break.

By: wspurlock

wspurlock — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 21:24:02 +0000

However, it looks like it’s a safe bet that we will see a slightly larger gain for today. At 3 pm we were back up to 1051.00 with the daily release still to come this evening.

By: wspurlock

wspurlock — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 21:18:40 +0000

It seems that the midnight pool numbers are whats used as the official numbers, so I’ll go with those.

December 28 - 1050.79
December 29 - 1050.88

This appears to be the largest gain in one 24 hour period (midnight to midnight) since March 1 - 2 of this year:

March 16 - 1068.14
March 17 - 1068.23

By: mickey

mickey — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:29:23 +0000

Any idea HOW long it’s been? Exact date? I’d like to post something about it.

Also, do any of you care to write up a guest post (or even part of one) about the rise we’re expecting (hoping for?) over the next few months? I’ve seen a lot of discussion about it and I was hoping one of you could summarize some of that into something I could post on the blog.

By: rkolter

rkolter — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:53:58 +0000

Yeah, this is really good news wspurlock. Look at that growth! First rise of that amount in a very, very long time.

By: JohnC

JohnC — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:35:38 +0000

RichS,

No problem. My point was that the minimum flow rates have not increased, so that is not why the lake is at record lows.

I was posing the link to the average rainfall for the logic of the thread at hand.

Of course there was the most recent reduction, which was an emergency measure Fl is challenging.

I would like to learn more about the minimum flow rates myself and was only adding what I read.

Good stuff guys!