The remnants of Tropical Storm Ernesto came though here last weekend. It managed to produce one of the highest one day rain totals I have seen since I started tracking many years ago. The total for the storm came in at 7.03 inches with most of that falling in about a 12 hours period.
Despite all that rain the stream only rose to bank full. I have seen worst with less rain. The dry weather prior to the arrival of Ernesto no doubt keep the stream levels down.
As for happenings along the stream - there was not much. One of the two large Tulip Poplars now appears to be leaning ever so slightly toward the stream. Since I have not been doing any measurements on the tree I can't say if that is a real change, or if I am just imagining a change. I am now going to have to find a way to measure the lean of that tree.
The tree in question is all by dead. Several years ago a beaver managed to eat all of the bark of the tree up to a level of about two feet. The tree has been dying a slow death ever since. The bark is riddled with holes from insects that have been feasting on the dying tree. there is now a very small canopy of leaves at the top of the tree. All of that is a shame as it is one of the older trees along the steam bank.
It has been over a week since my last post. I must be falling down on the job. However on the day of my last post I installed a new weather station. The old one, while recording and seeming to work just fine, refused to cooperate and reliably download the data to the PC. It started to act up last summer and got progressively worst until at the end it would work for about an hour at best. I got tired of loosing the data and not being able to watch the weather trends in real time.
The new station is a Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2. While the old one had the temperature sensor mounted on the side of the house and the rain gauge mounded on the roof, the new one has both mounted on a pole out in the yard.
So far I have been comparing some of the data from each. The temperature measurements vary within a few degrees of each other. I can see where at night the proximity of the house seem to be keeping the temperature a couple of degrees warmer then out in the yard. My main concern is the rain measurements. The old rain gauge measures a bit higher than the new one. I am concerned that the pole it is mounted on is blocking some of the rain from making it to the gauge. However I also think there is something going on in the programing of the new gauge. I say that as the new gauge seems to be a bit slower picking up the start of a rainfall. In the time the gauge has been in place the old gauge has measured 1.50 inches of rain while the new gauge has measured only 1.38 inches of rain. However most of the difference came in the last storm which was an all day off an on event.
Meanwhile without any heavy rain and no snow in a few weeks now the stream has not changed. and looks its rather dull winther color.
I went down to the stream and remeasured my contour line for the third point bar. As it turned out the changes were minimal. It is going to take either one big storm or a number of slightly smaller ones to change much on that point bar.
Of more interest is that changes taking place on the first point bar. It seems to want to migrate down stream. So the upper end of it is being slowly washed away. Meanwhile the downstream end is being prevented from moving by the limbs from the big Tulip tree that fell a year and a half ago. Those limbs catch the debris coming down stream and then clog the one side of the stream just enough so that the water shifts to the other side of the stream. This cuts off the growth of the point bar on the down steam side.
I am debating some way of easily mapping the changes in the shape of the point bar. I have one method, but it takes a bit more work than I want to put into it at this time.
Midweek we had a mixture of snow, ice and rain. When I made my trip down to the steam yesterday I realized we had a bit more rain than I thought. As my weather station is still on the fritz I had not been tracking the rain amounts as much. I am going to replace the old station. It still refuses to consistently communicate with my PC. And clearly the problem is in the weather station.
So I checked and the rain had come in at 1.75 inches. So it was not surprising that the water level had risen about half way to bankfull. The leaves that had be covering the point bars were for the most part gone. So I guess the means we are really into winter now - as if the snow did not already tell me that.
Sometime this week I will go out an measure the contour of the third point bar and update it for any changes. The last time I did that was back in July. It was so dry over the end of the summer. The stream had stopped flowing altogether. Thus the major rain storm we had in early October did not do much to raise the level of the stream. We have not had any big rain storms since then. So I am curious if this one had any effects.
The cold weather arrive ealier than usual this year and seems to be sticking around. This patch of ice was found along the banks of the stream in a protected area where the water pools.
The cold weather has stayed around so I managed to catch some of the remaining snow on the logs laying in the stream bed.
We had our third snow storm of the season overnight. Usually the first doesn't come until after Christmas. So perhaps we will have a good snowy winter. We are about due for one.
None of the storms have amounted to much. The first was and inch. The second, just this past Tuesday was three inches. And this last one was all of two inches.
I am hoping I can get out early enough the morning to catch the forest floor while some of the snow remains. It is time for some images for the winter.
This image was from about a week ago. Mostly the steam remains unchanged. We did get about a half an inch of rain this week.
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