We’ve already had two big events like this so far this year, now forecasts show a clear pattern of a heavily moisture laden “atmospheric river” taking aim directly onto the Oroville Dam watershed over the next week. Accumulated precipitation forecasts show that the Lake Orovile watershed will score a direct hit with the maximum amount of precipitation over the next 10 days (see graphic near bottom of this article).
Above: Computer forecast models indicate a powerful jet stream will continuously pound California over the next ten days and bring copious amounts of moisture from off of the Pacific Ocean into the state. This 10-day loop of predicted upper-level winds at 250 mb are in 6-hour increments from today until Thursday, February 23rd; maps courtesy tropicaltidbits.com, NOAA/EMC (GFS)
Meteorologist Paul Dorian of Vencore Weather writes:
There have been many occasions in the past in which floods have followed droughts in California and this recent time period is yet another example. In California, incredible amounts of rain have piled up in recent weeks across low-lying areas of the state, mountains of snow have accumulated in the higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada Mountains – and more is on the way. After a couple days with a break in the action, another storm is likely to arrive in northern California by later Wednesday and continue into Thursday and then a second storm looks like it will slam the entire state by early this weekend.
After a lengthy drought, California has been battered by potentially record-setting rain, with the Northern California region getting 228 per cent more than its normal rainfall for this time of year. The average annual rainfall of about 50 inches had already been overtaken with 68 inches in 2017 alone and another 6+ inches is possible over the next week-to-ten days. The latest computer model forecast of upper-level winds for the next ten days (Monday, 2/13 to Thursday, 2/23) does not hold out much hope for any significant drying in California. Powerful winds in the upper atmosphere (at 250 mb) will continuously pound California and bring copious amounts of moisture from the Pacific Ocean into the state. The total precipitation forecast map by NOAA for the next 7 days indicates more significant rainfall (and snowfall) is likely throughout the state.
The long-term forecast has rainfall totals withing the watershed that are showing the exact spot where Lake Oroville watershed is located will get 11.62 inches of rain over the next 10 days, the most accumulated rainfall in the entire western USA:
Map courtesy of WeatherBell
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Where’s Joe Romm?
That reminds me. Guess who reared his ugly head on to discuss the travails of the dam on “The Ten O’Clock News” (Oakland) last night? Peter Gleick! And not a word about climate change, I kid you not.
Looking for Waldo I suspect!
They’ve got a long hard row to hoe when it comes to fixing the problems. Unless the situation has changed lately they can’t even use generation to pass water from the reservoir because of the water level in the retention pool at the dam’s base and the fact that they disconnected the powerhouse from the grid and the generators cannot be run without their output being distributed. There have been tons of debris from the erosion around the spillways deposited in that pool and they have to deal with that. They’ll have to drop the lake below the spillway intake, the approximately 50ft from full pool that they’re planning on, and even then they can’t be assured that the main spillway will be unused while the repairs are underway unless they have the emergency spillway in a completely stable condition. They’re juggling hand grenades with all the pins pulled. Good luck and God bless all the people downstream who’ve paid their salaries and depended on them.
Boil lake water with the generated power. It will help lower the level. This is a very silly but somehow attractive concept.
I think it’d take a leetle more energy than that to boil off even a small part of a 25 square mile lake. 🙂
Might do better with bucket brigades.
Remember in my youth the stage electrician using a bucket with lowering electrodes in it to dim the lights using 240volts mains. Surely the dam could be used to take the output of the generators so the so the exhaust water would contribute to lowering the dam level ?
With min temps following dew points, is it any wonder we’ve had such a warm winter, look at that water coming.
The remnants of Hurricane David dropped 1/4 to 1/3 the vol of Lake Erie on it’s trip from the gulf to Canada
The MetaBunk professional forum below has pretty well established that the emergency spillway will breach when used again. The current incoming storm’s outcome will depend on how effectively the main (but cratered) concrete spillway dewaters the reservoir. That is very much a factor of how fast and long the rainfall enters the spillway.
https://www.metabunk.org/oroville-dam-spillway-failure.t8381/
See that forum’s pages 12-16 discussing weathered bedrock.
And we still have a month of rain coming in. A warm rain will melt some to a lot of the @ur momisugly 2.8 million acre feet of snowpack in the Oroville watershed pretty fast. This won’t be over until May.
Here in the NE upstate NY region, we generally get steady weather except with the el Nino/la Nina cycles. California, on the other hand, is mostly dry with ‘good years’ of nice rain and terrible droughts with immense, nearly unimaginable amounts of moisture that would make Noah cringe.
It has always been like that. During the very dry 1930s, all the movies were made there due to dry weather. Then it got wet again! They were stunned by this, never expected it. Well, that is how California always has been.
One can see how much the last storm brought to Oroville Dam and do simple math on the draw down in this link. If the storm is anything like the last one, you will have intense pressure on the system.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/products/orores.pdf
What concerns us even more is the inability to draw down Shasta as well, even with very heavy releases. The Northern California water system has two main dams which include Shasta (more west) and Oroville Dam (more east, for those that may not be familiar with the area.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/products/shares.pdf
It seems to our group that the whole system will be greatly stressed and that there is real risk of Sacramento City and the regional area flooding. Many levees are already showing stress water leaching today. This is the wettest season in recent recorded history and one should be expecting rare events to occur….
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/products/PLOT_ESI.pdf
Jeremy, you are entirely correct. The Sacramento area levees have enough problems this year without any pulse coming down from Oroville.
They opened the Yolo bypass around 4 days ago for the first time in some years. The Sacramento must be flowing a lot of water by now.
The picture below shows the primary spillway after the initial erosion was reported 2/9/17. You can see water spraying out of the sidewalls at regular intervals into the primary spillway. That water is coming from drains installed to relieve any hydrostatic pressure that may occur behind the sidewalls or under the concrete slabs of the primary spillway bed. Given the volume of water spraying from each drain on both side walls above the main bed failure, there was/is a lot of water moving under and around the sides of the primary spillway structures.
The hole is now completely across.
Has WUWT been caught sleeping at the wheel? I would have expected this explosive news to be reported here as a scoop!
http://www.climatedepot.com/2017/02/14/supreme-court-justice-samuel-alito-carbon-dioxide-is-not-a-pollutant/
(Sorry, “Tips and Notes” page not working for me. Way too slow (too many comments) before showing “Error in page…”)
Wow, just wow, or rather WOOP YEAH, 3 cheers…..
+1. Well worth reading.
Yes, there is about a years or more of comments which need to load. Effectively out of service until Anthony clear out the dead wood.
I saw it, but it’s just not that interesting since it is an individual opinion, not a court decision.
Thanks for your response. My thinking was that it’s not every day that such an influential individual bats for the skeptics’ side. In fact, it may signal the early stages of alarmism going out of fashion!
Thanks Graham Great pick-up. That one was of course completely buried by the MSM I would think!
I forgot to add that moonbeam after lambasting Trump for weeks about sanctuary cities and States he went out Monday morning asking for Federal Aid in this emergency!
“Sorry, “Tips and Notes” page not working for me. Way too slow (too many comments) before showing “Error in page…”
It’s not too many comments, it is the page is trying to load too many scripts. Get a script blocker and the page loads just fine. I use “NoScript” on Firefox.
Thanks, Anthony. I’m working on it.
This WUWT article now linked on Drudge Report.
Foot of rain possible….
Peter Gleick also had an article in the Mercury News on the end of the drought. No mention of climate change and no scare mongering. The article reads like a common sense reminder of California’s historic struggle with water issues. Amazing what a guy can do when he’s not infested with politics.
Global Raining obviously, Let’s invest in a couple of trillion dollars in kitty litter and cover California with it.
They want to secede from the US. Let them stand alone. Trump has already declared them a disaster area. As a former resident the state, it’s always been a disaster.
Perhaps this should have been a higher priority than rapid rail?
OK, from my calcs:
Drainage area = 3,611 sqmi (from Table of Statistics). 11 inches of rain over the next ten days, equals an average inflow of 106.8k cuft/s. Since they have been releasing 100k cuft/s per day since Sunday, and will continue to do so, they should not overtop the emergency spillway.
Unless … the rain is a pineapple express, and melts a lot of snow. Pray for cold and drought, prepare for rain.
When this emergency is over and it is time to repair the spillway, I hope they don’t waste money by trying to rebuild the lower part of it. By the end of the season that will be down to bedrock and quite stable. All they really need to do is to stabilize the remaining upper section of the spillway against the possibility of undercutting. Filling that massive hole with dirt and sticking another concrete ramp over the top of it would be a pointless waste of money.
Ian + one, but you realize that would mean saving money on taxpayers dollars and the missed opportunity ( for bribes) to screw around with government contracts
They will build an entirely new concrete Spillway in whatever is left of the Emergency Spillway most likely down near the parking lot end. Then cement over the area under the 1/2 oval Concrete Emergency Spillway weir. Then repairs to the foot of the rump existing spillway becomes a tertiary emergency spillway…
I doubt it because then they have no ability to take the level down below 900′, the first priority when the rains are over would be to repair the bed of the main spillway
Phil:
I have that from the briefing from the DWR. You know, the guys in charge. They specifically said they expected to build a completely new spillway before next rain season, and the only place to do that is in the Emergency Spillway bed. Easiest part of that is the parking lot area.
They have already committed to cement “armor” of the area under the concrete weir part of the Emergency Spillway, so that isn’t a projection either, but just reporting.
The only unknown part is what will be done with the rump of the existing spillway. As repair of the entire ramp below the break is already off the table, per DWR, and “reinforcing the toe” of the broken spillway is also already stated as a goal, that too is “just reporting”. The only “guess” is that they would do more of it this summer while building the replacement spillway. That isn’t a very big guess…
So doubt all you want; but listen to the DWR briefings, as those are the guys making the actual decisions.
Also, in building the replacement spillway, they will bulldoze any depth trench they like into the parking lot area as they build it just like they did to create the present spillway. (Which I watched them build, BTW). So nothing prevents them from making any depth cut they like and any lowest level they like. Your notion that they can’t build a new spillway below 900 ft is a bit silly, as they only need use the same 1960s technology that built the first one… Bulldozers with chisels on them (giant metal teeth to rake out the soft rock), though they likely will not need the quad-dozers they used then as we make bigger ones now.
http://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/the-digger-blog/view/rare-cat-dd9g-quad-nine-dozer-in-action
Glaciers measured in years is politics.
Glaciers measured in decades is weather.
Glaciers measured in centuries is data.
Glaciers measured in millennia is climate.
Apologies. Mobile phone posted to wrong thread.
Governor Moonbeam and his hard-headed, doomsday climate mindset led him to believe that drought would be part of California’s legacy for years to come. So those educated nitwits in “leadership” thought the emergency spillway at Oroway would never be used and let it fall into disrepair. Oops.
The emergency spillway has not ‘fallen into disrepair’, the main spillway has suffered damage during the current overflow.
@richard G.
If they need to dump power, why the hell aren’t they out there rigging temporary lines so they can use the turbines? It’s like watching the Fukushima slow motion disaster all over again.
My understanding is that even if the lines were connected they couldn’t run the turbines full power at the moment anyway. The water level at the base of the power station has been elevated by all the debris that has washed down into the river and the turbines won’t work efficiently if their outlets are not above water.
Yes, turbines extract energy. Without energy extraction, turbines would over speed. To regulate speed and match frequency, water flow must be reduced.
Ian I am not one hundred percent sure but as I understand the turbines can run and release about 12,500cfs. As I listened to the reports the problem was not only at the bottom of the dam with debris in the outflow from the broken spillway but there was also a lot of debris at the intakes at the top of the dam ( after all the intakes are at the “high” side of the dam to get max power out of the flow. There was a lot of debris on the surface of the lake along the dam because of the speed of all the releasing water at both spillways pulled debris along the whole uphill side of the dam, Normally there are booms and nets to stop this stuff from getting close to the intakes but there was too much so they had to stop the turbines from being damaged
I watched the DWR briefings. They stated the generation was shut down due to risk of power room flooding from water backing up from debris at the bottom of the damaged spillway. Furthermore, they had to take the power lines down as they crossed the spillway and it was at risk of washing out the power line tower.
Since those generators can not work without grid sinc, they can’t be run.
Since flooded power rooms are useless then can’t be run.
When they can’t be run, they can’t pass water.
It’s that simple.
From DWR.
E.M.Smith February 15, 2017 at 9:54 pm
“Furthermore, they had to take the power lines down”
No, they didn’t.
You did not pay close attention to what was said in that briefing.
They removed wooden POWER POLES and wires down by the Feather River (where the spillway joins) and PGE folks were adding reinforcement to the bases of power transmission towers FURTHER up the hill.
Video later on confirmed the transmission towers were still in place as well.
It would pay to note closely ALL that was being said during the briefings.
:
Sorry, I may have been sloppy. Power is off, but it may have been power taken down not actual lines. The briefing I watched is no longer available on youtube, so I can’t validate what they said. What is certain is that power was not being sent over the lines (no sync power available), that some power lines were removed by PG&E, and that they were worried the tower was at risk. I thought they were the lines on that tower as it was all presented together, but as noted, I can’t check it now.
Note my reference to Murphy’s law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible moment.
Pass the extra over to us in deplorable country, we can use it.
Best solution? Wash this obscene State of dangerous liberals out to sea. Do the USA a favor and wash away CA.
You been watching CNN too?
Trump denies climate change, orders end of California drought, and destroys dam!
As we know from history, California has, like many places on earth, suffered catastrophic flood/drought cycles forever. Thus the need to build storage areas to help even out the downward flow of moisture once it reaches the ground and to help alleviate water shortages for citizen’s use. A once constructive state (and federal) government engineered and built a system of dams many decades ago. But since these are obviously not high-priority projects at present, new construction and maintenance of existing structures has fallen off. Of course emergencies like this one at Lake Oroville, drive home the need to re-focus our pooled talent towards revitalization, and to hopefully curb future incidents. It will be interesting to see if the motivation remains strong enough in the coming months to keep this situation on the front burner. Immediate social needs tend to take our minds away from this less than glamorous work. Our politicians don’t get as much ‘action’ out of dam projects at election time. It takes real leadership to get this stuff done. Or real calamity.
The geology of the emergency spillway isn’t soil. And the concrete dam at the spillway is solidly fixed to this rock, keyed and pinned solidly.
Yes, there will be erosion. But it will not fail. Erosion and silt transport is the worry that started this mess. All over fish. What did the fish do before the dam controlled water?
The fish multiplied and swarmed in the rivers. The Feather River was world famous back in the 1920s/30s for the steelhead and salmon.
Why is a dam needed in the first place? Electric generation? Because all the tree-hugging Liberals want hydro-power instead of good old coal? Duh, here in the East we’ve been using scubbers on coal fired plants for 50 years, but of course the tree-huggers out in California think coal is dirty. Since yinz already know that droughts are followed by torrential rains, and no one bothered to add maintenance costs to the dam, well there’s your problem right there.
Saw a woman on TV news a few years back, she was being interviewed while watching her second home being swallowed up in a massive mud slide, she had lost the first home similarly, and rebuilt on the same piece of ground up in a canyon, and the same torrential rains caused mud slides, and the home went sliding down the mountain. And she told the interviewer, “Sure we have droughts, and mud slides, and forest fires, and earthquakes … but the weather’s nice. No thanks, I’ll take the four seasons that we have in the East.
It was needed to prevent seasonal flooding of my home town and much of the rest of the central valley.
My old home town, 12 miles from Orovile, is 32 foot ( less than 10 m ) elevation and 210 miles to sea level. With that pitch, your choices are seasonal floods or no farming as everyone is a hundred mile commute or more away. We chose build a dam and no more floods. BTW, I remember the seasonal floods… water about 2 foot deep for miles. Wading in the streets (lots were raised 2 feet from grade to keep houses dry.. on 2 foot more of sill foundations). It is better with the dam.
It wasn’t built for electricity, it was built to store water for LA. EVEN WORSE
Wuhh oh! This is the densest flow of the entire winter so far, and it is now right off shore and will move inland in the next day or two. Note the TCW 2.5 kg/m2 marked. That is twice the densest flow that has made landfall this winter. …https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=total_cloud_water/orthographic=-151.91,28.34,497/loc=-126.780,37.700
Update: …The wind has pushed the storm further north than I anticipated due to the winds offshore moving northward. The rain is starting to fall at a moderate rate here in Trinity Co, and rain has set in from here all the way to the Canadian border. It looks like Oregon and Washington will get soaked along with upper Northern California.
One other thing is that temperatures on the Feather River drainage are warm. Quincy, at 3500 ft elevation, sits on the Middle fork of the Feather and it is currently 54 degrees F. The average low is 27 degrees F meaning that Quincy is 27 degrees F above the average. The Middle fork is a big wing of the Feather River drainage. The forecast for the next 10 days is rain or snow for the entire 10 days. The forecast rain for the next 3 days equals 2.8 inches. While the next 7 days are estimated to be around 9 inches of mostly rain with some snow next week. …http://www.intellicast.com/Local/Weather.aspx?location=USCA0904
ps…it is starting to pour here in Trinity Co.
It is now 7 hours since It started to pour, and it has been a heavy rain for most of those 7 hours. The Intellicast forecast was for 0.24 in of rain for today, but the first hour of rain probably dropped more than that. The rain still is a steady drumbeat on the roof.