The late Jack Morris of Kaslo had a rule of thumb about high water on Kootenay Lake. He would watch a patch of snow on the mountainside and he claimed that the spring flood would crest just as that snow melted.
I thought about Jack’s rule and it made good sense. At this time of year, the determining factors for the Lake’s level is inflow and the constriction at Grohman Narrows which limits the outflow. As the snow line moves up the mountain in the spring, at some point there isn’t enough snow left above it in the high mountains to melt and provide a greater flow into the Lake than out. At this point, the Lake level will start to drop.
Alas, I don’t know which spot Jack monitored, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to see it from my home. But, might I do even better by using the Redfish Snow Pillow—a guide to snow depth in the mountains that is available on line for all to see?
The first question is: As the snow on the pillow melts in the spring, at what (water equivalent) depth does the Lake level typically crest? After a few years of monitoring, it seems the value is about 700 mm (with some variation).
The second question is then: Can we predict when this year’s plot will descend to 700 mm? Yes, look at this year’s plot. It is the dark blue line. It looks as though it will track fairly close to the lighter blue line from a previous year. This crosses the 700 mm point on the final day of the month, or perhaps the first day of July.
Now, I am not so naïve as to believe that this approach captures all the variability possible: sudden warm spells, or extensive rain. Yet, it is probably not far off.
For now (June 8th) my expectation is that the Lake will not crest before the dying days of the month.
It is early June; the Lake is rising and hasn’t finished doing so.
Do, but don’t learn
Today there was a book launching in Nelson in a children’s series entitled: Learn and Do. The book, called Let’s Plant a Flower, is aimed at small children and encourages them to go outdoors and do just that. What can I say, this is a worthy objective nicely presented.
Yet, I have a problem with it. Certainly, I am in favour of encouraging children to go outside and interact with nature. But, while the book increases a child’s sensitivity to one aspect of nature (plants), it offers the child nonsense about another (weather). To see this, you have to visit the sample pages for the book on the website for Let’s Plant a Flower, and turn a couple of pages (click on the lower right corner of a page). Presented is an impossible rainbow—one that cannot happen in the natural world.
Red is on the outside; blue is on the inside.
The drawing displays a number of unnatural features; I will mention only two.
First, the colours in the book’s illustration are presented backwards. In nature, the colour order of the (primary) rainbow is red on the outside, blue on the inside. Nature is not capricious on this point. See the picture to the right, the header for this blog, or for that matter, any rainbow picture.
The observer's shadow is the centre of the bow; the Sun is on the other side of the sky.
Second, the Sun in the book’s illustration is positioned along the bow as if it were a buckle on a belt. In reality, if you look at a rainbow, the shadow of your head is the centre of the circular bow and the Sun is at your back. The Sun and the rainbow do not appear on the same side of the sky. That is just the way nature behaves.
So what? Isn’t the book’s illustration merely an example of artistic licence? Possibly, and I often thoroughly enjoy artistic licence, examples being the works of, say, Picasso or Escher. But I wouldn’t want my surgeon to have based his knowledge of anatomy on the works of Pablo Picasso, nor would I want my building contractor to have learned construction through the works of M.C. Escher. I would like such people to be grounded in reality.
In like manner, I wouldn’t want my children to learn about nature from this book.