Posts for Tag: drought
Colorado River Reservoir Levels
How much water is in the main Colorado River reservoirs?
Check out my California Reservoir Levels Dashboard
I based this graph off of my California Reservoir marimekko graph, because many folks were interested in seeing a similar figure for the Colorado river reservoirs.
This is a marimekko (or mekko) graph which may take some time to understand if you aren’t used to seeing them. Each “row” represents one reservoir, with bars showing how much of the reservoir is filled (blue) and unfilled (brown). The height of the “row” indicates how much water the reservoir could hold. Lake Mead is the reservoir with the largest capacity (at almost 29,000 kaf) and so it is the tallest row. The proportion of blue to brown will show how full it is. As with the California version of this graph, there are also lines that represent historical levels, including historical median level for the day of the year (in red) and the 1 year ago level, which is shown as a dark blue line. I also added the “Deadpool” level for the two largest reservoirs. This is the level at which water cannot flow past the dam and is stuck in the reservoir.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell are by far the largest of these reservoirs and also included are several smaller reservoirs (relative to these two) so the bars will be very thin to the point where they are barely a sliver or may not even show up.
Historical Data
Historical data comes from https://www.water-data.com/ and differs for each reservoir.
- Lake Mead – 1941 to 2015
- Lake Powell – 1964 to 2015
- Flaming Gorge – 1972 to 2015
- Lake Mohave – 1952 to 2015
- Lake Navajo – 1969 to 2015
- Blue Mesa – 1969 to 2015
- Lake Havasu – 1939 to 2015
The daily data for each reservoir was captured in this time period and median value for each day of the calendar year was calculated and this is shown as the red line on the graph.
Instructions:
If you are on a computer, you can hover your cursor over a reservoir and the dashboard at the top will provide information about that individual reservoir. If you are on a mobile device you can tap the reservoir to get that same info. It’s not possible to see or really interact with the tiniest slivers. The main goal of this visualization is to provide a quick overview of the status of the main reservoirs along the Colorado River (or that provide water to the Colorado).
Units are in kaf, thousands of acre feet. 1 kaf is the amount of water that would cover 1 acre in one thousand feet of water (or 1000 acres in water in 1 foot of water). It is also the amount of water in a cube that is 352 feet per side (about the length of a football field). Lake Mead is very large and could hold about 35 cubic kilometers of water at full (but not flood) capacity.
Data and Tools
The data on water storage comes from the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado River Water Operations website. Historical reservoir levels comes from the water-data.com website. Python is used to extract the data and wrangle the data in to a clean format, using the Pandas data analysis library. Visualization was done in javascript and specifically the D3.js visualization library.
California Snowpack Levels Visualization
How does the current California snowpack compare with Historical Averages?
If you are looking at this it’s probably winter in California and hopefully snowy in the mountains. In the winter, snow is one of the primary ways that water is stored in California and is on the same order of magnitude as the amount of water in reservoirs.
When I made this graph of California snowpack levels (Jan 2023) we’ve had quite a bit of rain and snow so far and so I wanted to visualize how this year compares with historical levels for this time of year. This graph will provide a constantly updated way to keep tabs on the water content in the Sierra snowpack.
Snow water content is just what it sounds like. It is an estimate of the water content of the snow. Since snow can have be relatively dry or moist, and can be fluffy or compacted, measuring snow depth is not as accurate as measuring the amount of water in the snow. There are multiple ways of measuring the water content of snow, including pads under the snow that measure the weight of the overlying snow, sensors that use sound waves and weighing snow cores.
I used data for California snow water content totals from the California Department of Water Resources. Other California water-related visualizations include reservoir levels in the state as well.
There are three sets of stations (and a state average) that are tracked in the data and these plots:
- Northern Sierra/Trinity – (32 snow sensors)
- Central Sierra – (57 snow sensors)
- Southern Sierra – (36 snow sensors)
- State-wide average – (125 snow sensors)
Here is a map showing these three regions.
These stations are tracked because they provide important information about the state’s water supply (most of which originates from the Sierra Nevada Mountains). Winter and spring snowpack forms an important reservoir of water storage for the state as this melting snow will eventually flow into the state’s rivers and reservoirs to serve domestic and agricultural water needs.
The visualization consists of a graph that shows the range of historical values for snow water content as a function of the day of the year. This range is split into percentiles of snow, spreading out like a cone from the start of the water year (October 1) ramping up to the peak in April and then converging back to zero in summertime. You can see the current water year plotted on this in red to show how it compares to historical values.
My numbers may differ slightly from the numbers reported on the state’s website. The historical percentiles that I calculated are from 1970 until 2022 while I notice the state’s average is between 1990 and 2020.
You can hover (or click) on the graph to audit the data a little more clearly.
Sources and Tools
Data is downloaded from the California Data Exchange Center website of the California Department of Water Resources using a python script. The data is processed in javascript and visualized here using HTML, CSS and javascript and the open source Plotly javascript graphing library.
Interactive California Reservoir Levels Dashboard
How much water is in California’s reservoirs?
Check out my new Colorado river reservoirs visualization.
I also added the ability to select specific reservoirs to display on the graph and share a custom URL which will point those selected reservoirs (click on “list” button on top right of dashboard).
If you are reading this, it’s probably the winter rainy season in California again, and time to check on the status of the water in the California reservoirs. I previously made a “bar graph” showing the overall level of water in the major California reservoirs. This dashboard provides a bit more detail on the state of each of the reservoirs while also showing an aggregate total. It updates hourly using data from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) website, giving an up-to-date picture of California reservoir levels.
This is a marimekko (or mekko) graph which may take some time to understand if you aren’t used to seeing them. Each “row” represents one reservoir, with bars showing how much of the reservoir is filled (blue) and unfilled (brown). The height of the “row” indicates how much water the reservoir could hold. Shasta is the reservoir with the largest capacity and so it is the tallest row. The proportion of blue to brown will show how full it is, while the red line shows the historical level that reservoir is typically at for this date of the water year. The blue line indicates the reservoir’s water level one year ago today. There are many very small reservoirs (relative to Shasta) so the bars will be very thin to the point where they are barely a sliver or may not even show up.
Instructions:
If you are on a computer, you can hover your cursor over a reservoir and the dashboard at the top will provide information about that individual reservoir. If you are on a mobile device you can tap the reservoir to get that same info. It’s not possible to see or really interact with the tiniest slivers. The main goal of this visualization is to provide a quick overview of the status of the main reservoirs in the state and how they compare to historical levels.
You can sort the mekko graph by size – largest at the top to smallest at the bottom – or by reservoir location, from north to south.
If you click on the “list” button in the top right of the dashboard, it will show a list of the reservoirs (in order of size from largest to smallest) and you can check which ones you would like to display. You can also share a custom URL by clicking the “Save URL” button which will put the custom URL into the URL bar of your browser which you can then copy and share. You can also use it to monitor only the reservoirs you are most interested in.
Units are in kaf, thousands of acre feet. 1 kaf is the amount of water that would cover 1 acre in one thousand feet of water (or 1000 acres in water in 1 foot of water). It is also the amount of water in a cube that is 352 feet per side (about the length of a football field). Shasta is very large and could hold about 3.5 cubic kilometers of water at full (but not flood) capacity.
Data and Tools
The data on water storage comes from the California Department of Water Resources’ (DWR) Data Exchange Center. Python is used to extract the data from this page hourly and wrangle the data in to a clean format. Visualization was done in javascript and specifically the D3.js visualization library. It was my first time using D3 and it took me a long time to get up to speed. It takes a fair amount of work to make graphs compared to other more plug-and-play libraries but its very customizable, which is a plus. It was the only tool that I could find that would allow me to make a vertical marimekko graph.
How Fast Are California Reservoirs Filling Up?
Update: I added a date slider to let you scrub through dates as well as the ability to pause the animation.
In my California water levels visualization, I presented a “bar graph” showing the amount of water currently in California’s reservoirs. However, I thought it’d be interesting to see how this has changed over the course of the last few months, since the state has gotten alot of rain and snow recently.
This visualizations “animates” the graph for recent history (going back to October 1, 2015) showing how the recent rains (or lack thereof) has been caused the levels of the reservoirs in California to rise (and fall).
The historical average represents a daily average reservoir level. It changes for each day of the water year to represent seasonality of precipitation and runoff.
Click the “animate” button below the figure and you can use the slider to change the speed of animation as it cycles through the days. I added a Date slider which lets you scrub through all the dates and animate from different points. (more…)
How Much Water is in California Reservoirs? – Current and Historical Visualization
**Check out the new reservoirs dashboard**
California has had an issue with drought, especially for the past few years now. Recently, 2016-2017’s El Nino weather patterns has brought a significant amount of rain to the state and helped alleviate some, but not all, of the major issues.
I’ve been very curious to understand how the rain storms we experience are lessening the impact of the drought, and whether one wet season (like 2016-2017) can really “get the state out of a drought”. One way to assess this is to look at the status of California reservoirs.
Colorado River Reservoir Levels
How much water is in the main Colorado River reservoirs?
Check out my California Reservoir Levels Dashboard
I based this graph off of my California Reservoir marimekko graph, because many folks were interested in seeing a similar figure for the Colorado river reservoirs.
This is a marimekko (or mekko) graph which may take some time to understand if you aren’t used to seeing them. Each “row” represents one reservoir, with bars showing how much of the reservoir is filled (blue) and unfilled (brown). The height of the “row” indicates how much water the reservoir could hold. Lake Mead is the reservoir with the largest capacity (at almost 29,000 kaf) and so it is the tallest row. The proportion of blue to brown will show how full it is. As with the California version of this graph, there are also lines that represent historical levels, including historical median level for the day of the year (in red) and the 1 year ago level, which is shown as a dark blue line. I also added the “Deadpool” level for the two largest reservoirs. This is the level at which water cannot flow past the dam and is stuck in the reservoir.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell are by far the largest of these reservoirs and also included are several smaller reservoirs (relative to these two) so the bars will be very thin to the point where they are barely a sliver or may not even show up.
Historical Data
Historical data comes from https://www.water-data.com/ and differs for each reservoir.
- Lake Mead – 1941 to 2015
- Lake Powell – 1964 to 2015
- Flaming Gorge – 1972 to 2015
- Lake Mohave – 1952 to 2015
- Lake Navajo – 1969 to 2015
- Blue Mesa – 1969 to 2015
- Lake Havasu – 1939 to 2015
The daily data for each reservoir was captured in this time period and median value for each day of the calendar year was calculated and this is shown as the red line on the graph.
Instructions:
If you are on a computer, you can hover your cursor over a reservoir and the dashboard at the top will provide information about that individual reservoir. If you are on a mobile device you can tap the reservoir to get that same info. It’s not possible to see or really interact with the tiniest slivers. The main goal of this visualization is to provide a quick overview of the status of the main reservoirs along the Colorado River (or that provide water to the Colorado).
Units are in kaf, thousands of acre feet. 1 kaf is the amount of water that would cover 1 acre in one thousand feet of water (or 1000 acres in water in 1 foot of water). It is also the amount of water in a cube that is 352 feet per side (about the length of a football field). Lake Mead is very large and could hold about 35 cubic kilometers of water at full (but not flood) capacity.
Data and Tools
The data on water storage comes from the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado River Water Operations website. Historical reservoir levels comes from the water-data.com website. Python is used to extract the data and wrangle the data in to a clean format, using the Pandas data analysis library. Visualization was done in javascript and specifically the D3.js visualization library.
California Snowpack Levels Visualization
How does the current California snowpack compare with Historical Averages?
If you are looking at this it’s probably winter in California and hopefully snowy in the mountains. In the winter, snow is one of the primary ways that water is stored in California and is on the same order of magnitude as the amount of water in reservoirs.
When I made this graph of California snowpack levels (Jan 2023) we’ve had quite a bit of rain and snow so far and so I wanted to visualize how this year compares with historical levels for this time of year. This graph will provide a constantly updated way to keep tabs on the water content in the Sierra snowpack.
Snow water content is just what it sounds like. It is an estimate of the water content of the snow. Since snow can have be relatively dry or moist, and can be fluffy or compacted, measuring snow depth is not as accurate as measuring the amount of water in the snow. There are multiple ways of measuring the water content of snow, including pads under the snow that measure the weight of the overlying snow, sensors that use sound waves and weighing snow cores.
I used data for California snow water content totals from the California Department of Water Resources. Other California water-related visualizations include reservoir levels in the state as well.
There are three sets of stations (and a state average) that are tracked in the data and these plots:
- Northern Sierra/Trinity – (32 snow sensors)
- Central Sierra – (57 snow sensors)
- Southern Sierra – (36 snow sensors)
- State-wide average – (125 snow sensors)
Here is a map showing these three regions.
These stations are tracked because they provide important information about the state’s water supply (most of which originates from the Sierra Nevada Mountains). Winter and spring snowpack forms an important reservoir of water storage for the state as this melting snow will eventually flow into the state’s rivers and reservoirs to serve domestic and agricultural water needs.
The visualization consists of a graph that shows the range of historical values for snow water content as a function of the day of the year. This range is split into percentiles of snow, spreading out like a cone from the start of the water year (October 1) ramping up to the peak in April and then converging back to zero in summertime. You can see the current water year plotted on this in red to show how it compares to historical values.
My numbers may differ slightly from the numbers reported on the state’s website. The historical percentiles that I calculated are from 1970 until 2022 while I notice the state’s average is between 1990 and 2020.
You can hover (or click) on the graph to audit the data a little more clearly.
Sources and Tools
Data is downloaded from the California Data Exchange Center website of the California Department of Water Resources using a python script. The data is processed in javascript and visualized here using HTML, CSS and javascript and the open source Plotly javascript graphing library.
Interactive California Reservoir Levels Dashboard
How much water is in California’s reservoirs?
Check out my new Colorado river reservoirs visualization.
I also added the ability to select specific reservoirs to display on the graph and share a custom URL which will point those selected reservoirs (click on “list” button on top right of dashboard).
If you are reading this, it’s probably the winter rainy season in California again, and time to check on the status of the water in the California reservoirs. I previously made a “bar graph” showing the overall level of water in the major California reservoirs. This dashboard provides a bit more detail on the state of each of the reservoirs while also showing an aggregate total. It updates hourly using data from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) website, giving an up-to-date picture of California reservoir levels.
This is a marimekko (or mekko) graph which may take some time to understand if you aren’t used to seeing them. Each “row” represents one reservoir, with bars showing how much of the reservoir is filled (blue) and unfilled (brown). The height of the “row” indicates how much water the reservoir could hold. Shasta is the reservoir with the largest capacity and so it is the tallest row. The proportion of blue to brown will show how full it is, while the red line shows the historical level that reservoir is typically at for this date of the water year. The blue line indicates the reservoir’s water level one year ago today. There are many very small reservoirs (relative to Shasta) so the bars will be very thin to the point where they are barely a sliver or may not even show up.
Instructions:
If you are on a computer, you can hover your cursor over a reservoir and the dashboard at the top will provide information about that individual reservoir. If you are on a mobile device you can tap the reservoir to get that same info. It’s not possible to see or really interact with the tiniest slivers. The main goal of this visualization is to provide a quick overview of the status of the main reservoirs in the state and how they compare to historical levels.
You can sort the mekko graph by size – largest at the top to smallest at the bottom – or by reservoir location, from north to south.
If you click on the “list” button in the top right of the dashboard, it will show a list of the reservoirs (in order of size from largest to smallest) and you can check which ones you would like to display. You can also share a custom URL by clicking the “Save URL” button which will put the custom URL into the URL bar of your browser which you can then copy and share. You can also use it to monitor only the reservoirs you are most interested in.
Units are in kaf, thousands of acre feet. 1 kaf is the amount of water that would cover 1 acre in one thousand feet of water (or 1000 acres in water in 1 foot of water). It is also the amount of water in a cube that is 352 feet per side (about the length of a football field). Shasta is very large and could hold about 3.5 cubic kilometers of water at full (but not flood) capacity.
Data and Tools
The data on water storage comes from the California Department of Water Resources’ (DWR) Data Exchange Center. Python is used to extract the data from this page hourly and wrangle the data in to a clean format. Visualization was done in javascript and specifically the D3.js visualization library. It was my first time using D3 and it took me a long time to get up to speed. It takes a fair amount of work to make graphs compared to other more plug-and-play libraries but its very customizable, which is a plus. It was the only tool that I could find that would allow me to make a vertical marimekko graph.
How Fast Are California Reservoirs Filling Up?
Update: I added a date slider to let you scrub through dates as well as the ability to pause the animation.
In my California water levels visualization, I presented a “bar graph” showing the amount of water currently in California’s reservoirs. However, I thought it’d be interesting to see how this has changed over the course of the last few months, since the state has gotten alot of rain and snow recently.
This visualizations “animates” the graph for recent history (going back to October 1, 2015) showing how the recent rains (or lack thereof) has been caused the levels of the reservoirs in California to rise (and fall).
The historical average represents a daily average reservoir level. It changes for each day of the water year to represent seasonality of precipitation and runoff.
Click the “animate” button below the figure and you can use the slider to change the speed of animation as it cycles through the days. I added a Date slider which lets you scrub through all the dates and animate from different points. (more…)
How Much Water is in California Reservoirs? – Current and Historical Visualization
**Check out the new reservoirs dashboard**
California has had an issue with drought, especially for the past few years now. Recently, 2016-2017’s El Nino weather patterns has brought a significant amount of rain to the state and helped alleviate some, but not all, of the major issues.
I’ve been very curious to understand how the rain storms we experience are lessening the impact of the drought, and whether one wet season (like 2016-2017) can really “get the state out of a drought”. One way to assess this is to look at the status of California reservoirs.
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