What a difference a few weeks can make – warm to very cold (-30’C in some areas) to above 5’C with rain and rising freezing levels. Still seeing low to very low snow levels throughout our watershed, and rising river levels as they adjust to the recent rain and snowmelt. The Provincial snow monitoring report will be released Feb 8th, with an analysis often including more of the manual snow monitoring stations. Keep hoping for snow, and continue to think of ways that you can reduce water use this summer incase we enter again into a low water period.
Monitoring groundwater and river levels as we left the fall in drought conditions, we are seeing a slight rise in the groundwater levels at the three Provincial monitoring stations, which are all recording average levels: Beaverdell, Midway and Grand Forks. In response to the rain and low elevation snow melt, we are also seeing a rise in river levels throughout are region.
Click the following to access the Provincial Groundwater Well Monitoring map. Realtime surface water level information can be found at 2 main sites: Water Survey of Canada (Canadian Sites) and Northwest River Forecast Center (US sites). A map showing the snow and water level monitoring stations in the Kettle River watershed is at the RDKB Emergency Operations website under freshet conditions.
Going forward – what’s coming? Forecasting continues to be a mixture of modelling and human interpretation, so realizing that there is always uncertainty -especially with forecasting more than a few days out. Environment Canada is showing much higher than normal temperatures expected this spring. As we have been seeing all season, there is not a clear message whether we will see low, normal or higher precipitation amts compared to average.
We are still in a strong El Nino period (red), which matches to the high temps we are experiencing. A shift to neutral (grey) and La Nina (blue) is expected for the summer and fall. Normally, La Nina coincides with cooler and wetter conditions, however the summer of 2021 also showed a strong La Nina and the Boundary experienced a drought conditions. Check out the IRI site to see past ENSO forecasting and compare it with what actually happened.
