Greetings, all, as I welcome you to the flip side of my European get away--what a wonderful time it was to be on a first class AMA Waterways vessel gliding down the Danube River with a terminus in Budapest last week! Things of interest included cathedrals, abbeys, cobblestones, cornerstones and learning of two new-to-me taxes that impacted the middle ages: (i) a roof tax where folks were levied on the square footage of their enclosed roof (which explains why most castles are roofless today, as, when they were abandoned, their roofs were removed to sidestep taxation) and (ii) a window tax where, in other locales, homeowners were levied on the square footage of their windows (which led to many larger buildings seeming to have from afar a multiplicity of windows when, in fact, most were just frescoes painted on their outside wall!).
Well, today is May Day, gang, and with this advent we now begin in earnest our final preparations for Extravaganza 2017 and begin our annual "runoff watch". Witness the attached flow chart that, for the last ten (count 'em!) years we have compiled to track the annual runoff using the water flow of Rock Creek (right behind our Headquarters complex) as a base line for comparison. And away we go!!!
This year we are starting out meekly and mildly with, today, a current discharge rate of 858 cubic feet per second (the amount of water passing by each second as measured by monitoring devices placed in the river) with the expectation that, with current snow water equivalent in the upper climes now tracking at 120% of twenty year averages, with the coming of warmer western Montana weather (it was snowing on Rock Creek as recently as last week!) the melting of snow will accelerate and, correspondingly, the downhill flow of water will increase. Our goal is to track the great bell curve experience we had in 2009 (the black line on our flow chart) such that we get a good upwards push of discharge by later in the month with a precipitous fall come June 1st such that the flow is then right at 170 cfs (cubic feet per second) which harbors excellent fishing conditions come your arrivals into Missoula shortly thereafter.
As you can see from the tremendous variances from year to year, each year is a different story and, in looking at long range forecasts for Missoula (often an activity for only the foolish as weather there unpredictably changes literally every half hour!) temperatures climbing from the current projected mid-50's highs up into the 8's later this week (which should kickstart this year's runoff) and then mellowing out into a fairly routine and traditional averages in the high 60's and low 70's. Missoula's elevation is 3,000 feet and most of the snowfall that will be melting off is at twice that elevation. For those of you with a meteorological background, you know that temperature decrease by 3 degrees with every 1,000 of increased elevation such that a 60 degree Missoula reading equates to a 51 degree upper clime reading and, therefor, snow melting.
Ah, gang, indeed the final and yet opening chapter of E-17 begins and I will be giving you flow chart updates each Monday, Wednesday and Friday and you can watch the red line on our chart (which will track this year's runoff) evolve.
Bravo, bravo, bravo!!
Best to all in eager anticipation of it all,
Rock Creek Ron
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