Lake Mead Water Level has Dropped A Huge Amount in Last 48 Hours

Dont know what to say about this. I hope/suspect this is an error on the recording equipment as this appears to be a huge amount to drop in 48 hours.

Lake Mead Water Level

Here is the graph that shows the drop:



As you can see the drop is well out with the normal data sets. The lake level has went from 1076.78 feet above sea level on Thursday 21st to 1068.75 feet above sea level on Saturday 23rd. That's a drop of 8.03 feet over 2 days.

Surely that can't be right.

Opinions/ideas anyone ?

Maybe has something to do with the earthquake in Nevada?

Some further information: Lake Mead has wenrt from having 9745980 acre feet of water storage on Thursday to having 9100490 acre feet of water storage on Saturday. Thats a loss of 645490 acre feet of water in 48 hours.

en.wikipedia.org...

As a rule of thumb in U.S. water management, one acre-foot is taken to be the planned water usage of a suburban family household, annually.[2] In some areas of the desert Southwest, where water conservation is followed and often enforced, a typical family uses only about 0.25 acre-feet of water per year.[3] One acre-foot/year is approximately 893 gallons (3.38 m³) per day.

The acre-foot (or more specifically the time rate unit of acre-foot per year) has been used historically in the U.S. in many water-management agreements, for example the Colorado River Compact, which divides 15 million acre-feet (MAF) per year or (586 m³/s) among seven western U.S. states.

Elsewhere in the world, where the metric system is in common use, water volumes can be expressed in either cubic metres (as in flow rates of cubic metres/second, or "cumecs") or, for water usage, storage or irrigation volumes, in kilolitres (kL, = 1 cubic metre), megalitres (ML, = 1,000 cubic metres), or gigalitres (GL, = 1,000,000 cubic metres). One acre foot is approximately equivalent to 1,233 cubic meters.

So as far as I can tell that would mean that Lake Mead has lost 645490 x 1,233 = 795889170 cubic meters in 2 days. Surely that can't be right. An Olympic Sized swimming pool contains 2,500 cubic meters so that would mean 795889170/2500 = 318356 Olympic sized swimming pools in 2 days.

a reply to: randomspecific

sorry miss read the tile.

a reply to: randomspecific

If the water is flowing into a fault, it could lubricate the rock, making another quake more likely.

So we had a 4.8 on the 22nd along with some aftershocks:

USGS Nevada Quakes above 2.5

So could quake have caused this ?

Another source that shows recent quakes in nevada area:

earthquaketrack.com...

a reply to: randomspecific

You have a comma where you should have a decimal point. You are off by about 4 orders of magnitude.

Off the top, it would be around 800k cubic meters, if all the other numbers are accurate.

Troubling nonetheless.

a reply to: ISawItFirst

Where about's the comma that should be a decimal point. Maths is not my strong point.

back in 2008 and 2009 it was this low once before. looks like only 2 or 3 feet in difference,
i would maybe just watch and see if it does go lower than this.

lakemead.water-data.com...

This website has it at 1,077.30 Ft. as of today.

Mead.uslakes.info

ETA: Then there is this graph that is a little more concerning.

graphs.water-data.com...

a reply to: stosh64

That graph looks to be showing the same levels as I was reporting initially. Yes?

originally posted by: pimptriggs
back in 2008 and 2009 it was this low once before. looks like only 2 or 3 feet in difference,
i would maybe just watch and see if it does go lower than this.

lakemead.water-data.com...

The averages for 2008/2009 show that it is was no way near this low. Can you show me where you got the data from for 2008/2009 please. Would like to compare to the data for this year. Thanks.

a reply to: randomspecific


www.arachnoid.com...

a reply to: randomspecific

Yes, that's the way I read it.

Seems pretty drastic, and concerning to say the least.

But I am just a layman looking at lines.

I will be curious to see what some with more knowledge on this have to say.

a reply to: Char-Lee

Thanks for that source. Unfortunately source only updates once a month so while it shows that levels have been low on previous occasions it doesn't help to explain the extremely sudden drop. You can also see that when the last measurement was taken the lake is at a level never seen since lake was filled.

a reply to: randomspecific

The whole thing scares me! We have dipped into the lowest since first filling

Where I live coast ca/or border we normally have rain every week all year pretty much, it has not rained and I worry for the redwood trees. I used to water only once or twice a summer and I have already watered, things are changing very quickly.

I think they are going to be off


Now they expect the lake to be at elevation 1,061 by the start of 2017, a roughly 500 billion gallon difference for the nation’s largest-capacity man-made lake.

Don't worry, the water didn't go too far. It'll be sold to you as bottled water or beverages of some sort. Most of it will end up bottled in underground bunkers, or will be handed out during the upcoming emergency disasters. Profit off disasters... the American way! Sorry,... just a rant.

Did you factor in all the pools in Vegas being filled?

People seem surprised when they learn that human activity can cause quakes, said Leonardo Seeber, a research professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, but the cause-and-effect is only common sense.

"It's not surprising that if you change the stress regime, even by a little, you can trigger earthquakes."

Reservoirs are not a small change. Dams make it possible to move vast weight from one place to another. Lake Mead, at its current level, contains more than 16 million acre-feet of water. That's more than 5 trillion gallons of water, at 8 pounds per gallon, or more than 20 billion tons.

Quakes can also be triggered when you take weight off the ground in mining and quarrying. Injecting and extracting vast amounts of water, as is done in hydraulic fracturing operations, can be triggers, Seeber said.

Dams have caused major earthquakes in China and India, he said. "This belief that if you trigger earthquakes, they are going to be small, is simply not true," he said.

tucson.com...

There was a study done of the fault lines in the area after quakes began when they filled lake Mead. it is not unconceivable that it could trigger a devastating quake in L. V. if it continues to decline or when it refills (if it does).

I didn't realize they just had one...

Posted May 22, 2015 - 12:01pmUpdated May 23, 2015 - 10:33am
4.8-magnitude earthquake shakes Las Vegas;

originally posted by: Thorneblood
Did you factor in all the pools in Vegas being filled?

Evaporation and constant auto refill of all of those waterfalls and swimming pools would be a huge amount of water.