"Drought" in upstate NY

[Mendonsy]

We got a little bit of rain this morning but it was not enough to measure. We have had just under 1" in the past week. That's a lot better than we have been doing, but does not begin to make up for the 7.5" we are still short for the season.

 

[jymbee]

So despite living in Oswego County, darn near Lake Ontario almost my entire life, this is the first time I can recall being told we have a "drought". I'm not very agricultural, so I was wondering if anyone knew what the long term precipitation forecast is like for August and September, if such a thing can even really be predicted. Is the almanac real? Can I look in there? I get a feeling it isn't too good for things like weather, but I've been wrong before.

My well ran dry today. There is a drilled well on the property I've never used, that isn't plumbed to the house. I was thinking about dropping a submersible in there and pumping into the dug well that is plumbed into the house. It's not ideal, but it would be a short term solution if it's only needed every few days or so until some rain shows up. In fact, I wonder if that is why the previous owners drilled the well in the first place. Seems silly to drill a well and not use it.

I'm a little panicked, to be honest. Even as a child, we've never, ever had water issues, and I have no clue how to handle this.

Drought runs in cycles here in the Catskills. Here's a couple of shots taken around the large reservoirs back around 2001 that supply NYC with their water. Pretty bad but not nearly as bad as many other places. Friends in GA bought a "lakeside" house years ago. Can't even see the lake from their place now. And of course we've all seen pics of what's going on in the western part of the country. At the same time, historic flooding down south these past few days. Nature...


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[KWRB]

Well I did supplement the dug well with the drilled well. I thought about it after the fact, that the old drilled well hadn't been tested in a while, so I got the water tested. Positive for coliform, like every well around here. So, despite finally having water again, I had to shock the thing. We've been buying drinking water and taking quick showers and spreading the laundry out, and that's worked. Now, the bleach is through, and it's been raining a little, so I think we might be in the clear, as long as it keeps up.

The USGS has a monitoring well nearby, and a few weeks ago I imported the data to excel and plotted the last few years over top one another. At the time, the well was running about six weeks ahead of schedule, running down. Not a good sign for September or October. If this recent rainfall didn't reach the water table, and got soaked up by the grass and topsoil, or flowed out to Lake Ontario on top of the surface, it doesn't really help. When I get to the office in the morning, I'll grab that data and post it here. It's kinda cool stuff.

 

[KWRB]

Here are the plots of a nearby US Geologic Survey well. Blue is 2014, red is 2015, and green is this year so far. You can see that the rain we finally started getting has helped. The water table doesn't appear to be terribly much lower than last year's low point, but the lowest point seems to come around mid- to late-September, meaning unless the rain keeps up, we'll be quite a bit lower than last year.

 

[moeh1]

Wondering if they have any Survey wells down by me. Do you have a website handy?
We got some heavy rain yesterday, but we're still way behind.

 

[KWRB]

Wondering if they have any Survey wells down by me. Do you have a website handy?
We got some heavy rain yesterday, but we're still way behind.

To start with, The USGS Groundwater Office has a bunch of good stuff. It's a (rare) good allocation of tax dollars.

here is the New York map. Use this to locate the well near you (mine was Volney).
Click on the well, then click on the "station" number, which is a link.
From the well station page, there are a handful of options for viewing the well data. I used the "Current / Historical Observations, and output the data from 1-1-2014 to present. The wells take an automated meaurement every 15 minutes, so it's a ton of data points.

I exported into a tab-delimited ("Tab-separated w/ meas") text file, and imported to excel. The Excel magic to format the data and is a long set of instructions. If you know excel well enough, you can give it a shot, or you might be able to get what you want on the webpage. It's not hard for someone well versed in Excel to manipulate (I use it all day long). If you're not moe, and you'd like to have a plot like mine, I'll gladly do it for you.

As for being way behind, I don't think that will change until maybe spring. After the past week's fairly regular rains, and a toad-strangler of a weekend, it's barely flattening, and certainly not turning upward. As much as I hate to say it, we need a gnarly winter.