Reading A River Gauge

[Al Agnew]

Glad Kelroy explained it. As he said, it's three times higher than has ever been recorded ON FEB. 26, in the 47 years the gauge has been in existence. Go to the other graph to see how that translates to feet of rise, since on the 23rd it was about normal for this time of year. So you can look at the level in feet for the 23rd, and the level in feet at the top of the rise, and see how many feet it rose above normal.

Keep in mind also that those little triangles are the median flow for each date, which means that half the time the flow was higher than that and half the time it was lower than that for this particular day of the year. It's a pretty good indication of normal level, but it's dynamic...it changes with each day and changes a lot with each season. In mid-summer, those triangles are probably down to around 10-15 cubic feet per second, while right now they are up over 120 cfs. "Normal" is a lot higher now, and will get even higher in April, than it will be in the summer and fall.

1994 was the year of the big flood throughout the Ozarks during deer season. A lot of rivers got to near record levels that November. 1993 was the year of the great Mississippi River flood. And what a lot of people don't realize is that floods on the Mississippi have NOTHING to do with levels on Ozark streams. The canoe rental people are always complaining about that...their business drops off when the Mississippi is flooded, because a lot of people apparently think that if it's in the news that the Mississippi is flooded, everything else is, too.

[mic]

Thanks for the lessons.