The flooding in the midwest has been all over the news. I haven’t gotten a chance to glue my eyes to the TV to get the full sensationalism of it. I’ll catch up on that tonight.
Here, I want to put together some information from a place that many seem to forget about – the USGS. I’m calling this blog entry my little protest to the lack of investigative science coverage in the mainstream media when it comes to events like this. News outlets consistently report on the event, but never the causes – or even the dynamics that lead to the event. If they could take the extra fraction of a minute to go into just some of these details, minds might be opened along with eyes.
It is one thing to see the scale in terms of footage from a helicopter. That shows you the extent of impact on human lives. This data gives you a sense of scale in terms of HOW massive the flooding is. Keep in mind that graph is logarithmic. It shows that the normal discharge at Fargo on today’s date is about 600cfs (Cubic Feet per Second). This flood is at 30,000 cfs today; 50 times the norm.
The info below is from the USGS site monitoring the flood and compares the current stage levels to previous floods.
I put the historical crest data in chronological order (their rank is in parenthesis). Note the fact that until this flood, they have ALL occurred in April. I would suggest that this flood is a consequence of increased precipitation, the massive amount of runoff, and the lack of vegetative transpiration to take up the water. The real concern here is the increased run-off. This is coming from a number of sources and the increase in winter time precip is only partly to blame. Other factors include the fact that the river flows north into Canada and much colder weather. This is problematic when earlier springtime melt, additional runoff from increased precipitation all drain into a river that gets stopped up by ICE further downriver way up to the north. What is concerning is that this is a growing trend and that more frequence bigger precip events have long been described as consistent with climate change. Joe@Climate Progress sums it up.
(1) 40.66 on 03-27-2009
(6) 37.13 ft on 04/05/2006
(7) 36.69 ft on 04/14/2001
(3) 39.57 ft on 04/17/1997
(8) 35.39 ft on 04/09/1989
(9) 34.93 ft on 04/19/1979
(11) 34.41 ft on 04/02/1978
(5) 37.34 ft on 04/15/1969
(10) 34.65 ft on 04/16/1952
(2) 40.10 ft on 04/07/1897
(4) 37.80 ft on 04/11/1882
The flood frequency here is definitley increasing. Two floods in the late 19th century, and then nothing until the 1950s. then another just over a decade later. then two major floods in the 70’s just 2 years apart. then one in the 80’s and one in the 90’s less than a decade apart. And now 3 within 8 years.
I threw together this graph. I realize it only has a half-helping of awesome, but it makes the point. The trendline is a 3rd order polynomial.
Up up and away…
