Chart of Lanier’s Level compared to last year
Following up on our post from a few days ago, here is a chart showing Lanier’s level over the past few years. Click on the chart to view it full-sized.
The final few months of 2007 really left the lake in bad shape. It’s going to take a lot of rain to get caught back up.
As with the other data, I’ll try to update this chart around the first of each month.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:02 am
[...] plug-in I showed a few days ago, this can make for a great way to show charts on your website. Here is the page I used it on, showing the diminishing level of a lake near [...]
March 4th, 2008 at 11:20 am
A lot of rain in a tremendously short period of time. The fact is, it’s the start of March - the lake will not be caught up this year.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Does anyone know how much of the 2007 decline was directly attributable to the ACE’s releases resulting from the faulty meters?
If 2006 is a guide, even a wet March won’t help much - although the big unknown is how much ACE released last March for flood control.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Awesome!
March 4th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Any chance the chart can be adjusted to reflect the actual volume of water versus the water depth?
I’d imagine the visual difference from 2006 to 08 would be greater.
Cheers.
March 4th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
March 4th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Be optimistic, maybe a stray hurricane will dump a ton of rain on the watershed at some point.
March 4th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
It would be neat to see the dead pool level and/or the empty level on the chart - 1035 and 919. If you look at it without knowing the lake does not go down to zero, you get quite a different impression.
Visually, it would make quite an impact.
Rick
March 4th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I considered that, but it leads to another problem. Right now, the chart only shows a zone of 25 feet. If I included the bottom of the lake in there, the chart would show a total zone of about 150 feet. That would make the lines much closer to straight horizontal, which would give much less impact.
If you want to see it other ways, I would suggest:
- Take the data:
http://water.sam.usace.army.mil/gage/bufelev.htm
- Build some of your own:
http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/
- Post your results in the forum:
http://www.atlantawatershortage.com/forums/
If you (or anyone else) post some great ones, I’ll showcase them here in the blog.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Does anyone know or have a good guess why the rate of discharge almost doubled around the end of February and continues at that pace?
March 4th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Sorry, I meant to post this link to the data above -
http://water.sam.usace.army.mil/gage/acf/prob2.txt
March 4th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
As far as I know the surface area to volume function for Lake Lanier is not known, or at least, hasn’t been in any place I could find it. I was thinking that maybe you might be able to get some of it by calculating the inputs and outputs as the lake goes up and down. Inputs = rainfall and watershed area, outputs = evaporation and releases. If you knew how much was let out, you might be able to get an idea from the pseudo-linear portion from August to December of last year.
March 5th, 2008 at 9:56 am
On a good note, yesterday’s rain brought us half a foot of rise. Very nice gain. Sadly, we were losing that much every three or four days last fall so it will take a bunch of these rains to get us back where we need to be. At least it’s nice to see a real gain finally though.
March 5th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I concur!
March 7th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Regarding the volume of Lanier, I remember seeing a graph on this blog months ago which plotted the elevation on Lanier as it initially filled up, in the 1950s. If you assume a constant flow into the lake back then, you could calculate the volume at elevation by integrating over that graph.
I can’t find a link to that article, but I know it was on this site.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
http://www.atlantawatershortage.com/20071112/some-insight-into-the-vertical-layout-of-lanier/
April 1st, 2008 at 9:41 am
[...] up on the chart we did last month, here is a look at Lanier’s level updated for this [...]
April 6th, 2008 at 8:54 am
[...] The AJC has an article in today’s paper that discusses how much people have cut back to help conserve water in the metro area. It’s a pretty good article, looking at both conversation and current restrictions. The online version doesn’t include it, but there is a chart in the paper (page C8) which I’ve included a photo of. Does it look familiar? [...]