For our third visiting lecture series, we listened to a guy from NOAA come and speak. I guess he came last year, and the community really liked his presentation, and so Dan Dawson asked if he could come again this year. He spoke to us about the drought that Southern California is facing, and of course with the big question, when will it be over.

There’s no answer to that question yet, unfortunately. He spoke a bit about how difficult it is to predict the end (or the beginning) of a drought cycle, and that any sort of reliable prediction won’t come until at least August of this year. The reason people are holding their breath for this year, is because it is supposed to be an El Niño year, which primarily means wetter. One sign to look for, he mentioned, when looking for the end of a drought, is floods.

Well, ok captain obvious, anything else? Well, it’s not quite as obvious as you might think. Lots of water doesn’t necessarily mean a drought is over. You can have a wetter year, and still be in a downward trend of precipitation for a long term drought cycle. But apparently, a year with numerous and severe floods can be the signal that subsequent years will actually achieve closer to normal levels of precipitation, and that it can actually mean the long term drought cycle is over. (At least for now). So the big question is… is 2014 the year? Will the drought end over the winter between 2014 and 2015 because El Niño is expected this winter?

The answer……….. (drum roll please)……………. we don’t know. There just is no way to tell whether or not the drought will end this year. Of course, we all hope it does, or at the very least, that we get a much wetter winter this year, so that water levels might rise a bit again, but there is no way to tell until it happens.

The talk was very non-technical and interesting, certainly one that kept it interesting by holding the suspense for an answer until the very end. As it turns out, this was the last visiting lecture I saw while up here, because the following week I was worrying too much about the final Watershed Profile Assessment to attend the last one.

Until Next Time,

Joe

Though technically our class is over, I’ll continue posting about the events that happened in May, and I will probably do a couple each day, so that I can both resume spring semester posts, and start posting about my summer adventures as well.

So because of our failure of an expedition the previous Thursday, we ended up having to go back to Yost Lake to get a second set of water quality readings for the final watershed profile. While we were up there, we decided to get our lake depth reading and deep water sample, as well as our turbidity (water visibility) reading.

To do this, we decided to get up bright and early at 5:30. As usual, I got up a little earlier than my alarm, and found someone else still up from the night before, who had completely lost track of time and thought it was still 2 and not 5! The three of us were on the road by about 6:30. And I was paranoid about checking my Camelbak valve, to make sure it wasn’t pressed against anything!

When we got to the top, it was quite chilly, which made having to deal with the raft quite a miserable experience. Reid, who was the one who went in, discovered that the raft had two holes in it: one that let water into the seat, and one that was letting air out of the side. It became a race to finish.

We wrapped up everything by about 9:15, and made our way back down to the path. We made it to The Stove by 11 for a hot breakfast, which cheered everyone up I think. We made it back to SNARL just in time to see everyone else leaving for their adventure to go on a hike at Hot Creek (an exciting creek filled with geologic activity (geysers, hot pools, etc.). They invited us to go with them, since we were back. Our reaction? We got up at 5:30, just hiked 7 total miles up and back down 1,500 feet in elevation. Ha! (Thanks though).

I think we all crashed when we were back in the cabin, and were still like that when everyone returned an hour and a half later. A couple hours later, a small group of us went to the hot spring again, and surprisingly, we had the tub to ourselves (except for a few minutes when one woman joined us) and we able to enjoy our stay mostly undisturbed.

The rest of the weekend was pretty quiet, just working on homework until our meeting at 4pm on Sunday, to prepare for week 3!

Until Next Time,

Joe