Friday, August 02, 2019

July 2019 Lake Levels and Flow Rates

I usually save the following graphic for the end of the year, but the total amount of water that has passed through Bagnell Dam so far has been unprecedented in the time I've been keeping track of it. 3 of the 12 flood gates continue to remain partially open keeping flow rates just above 50,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). This means for the month of July 981 BILLION gallons of water flowed through the lake into the Osage River valley below. For the year, 3.7 TRILLION gallons have already passed, and the gates remain open.

For perspective, more water has already flowed through than all of 2015 when the lake flooded...twice. The year of the no wake 4th of July the total flow for Bagnell was 3.45 trillion gallons, which we have already exceeded. The Osage River Basin below Bagnell has been scoured.

Anyways, it's an impressive amount of water, so I've done a mid-year info-graphic for perspective. Again, this is just for the first 7 months, we have a lot more water to go until the end of the year.



Here's the candlestick graph for the month with lake max high, low, biggest daily change and max daily flow...

Flow scale in billions of gallons

And the full hourly detail.
Flow scale is in Cubic Feet Second (cfs)

And the monthly summary for the year so far. Notice that the total flow bar is nearly at the top of the graph. I've created this scale to this extreme high of 1000 billion based on the events of 2015. I didn't think we'd hit it again so soon. Just...wow.