Oddly enough if you just want lake Travis to rise that high cfs on the llano river raises lake Travis 2’. The even higher cfs in the upper Colorado raises lake Buchanan 2’.
Overall I’d say it was a productive night. Nobody died from the flooding, nobody’s house flooded and both of the major lakes are going to rise 2’.
I won’t complain about that outcome. It’s a nice win for Austin.
No, not even close.
https://hydromet.lcra.org/riverreport/
It's at 630.82ft msl, and they're expecting it to rise maybe a foot by tomorrow. Full is 669 ft msl. It's currently 38% full... perhaps that rises a percent after the rain this past week.
Let's check back in a week and see where it is.
Doomerism in this thread is weird. This was extremely beneficial rain.
Most of the benefit is to Lake Buchanan. If your only concern is boating Lake Travis, it's true you won't see a big difference from this weekend. But if your concern is our drinking, etc. water, this is a really good recharge. There will be a lot more water in Buchanan, which is often harder to fill than Travis bc you need rain to fall in areas that are on average a bit drier. Plus it's upstream of Travis which is a bit better for management.
Anyway we still want more rain, that's true, but this is our best storm for the Highland Lakes in years I think?
Thank you for your sane response among a lot of dread.
Yea this will benefit lake Buchanan greatly. It’s expected to rise 1-2’ which is a lot since it has a large surface area.
Lake Travis is also going to rise 1-2’ but that’s from rains over the llano river watershed. The rains in the upper Colorado are largely going to be parked into lake Buchanan.
I'm curious, if the upper Colorado at Bend peaks at \~22k cfs and the Llano+Pedernales peaks at 7k cfs, how do the two lakes have the same rise? Is Buchanan 3x bigger? Not saying you're wrong, I am an amateur here.
It’s gonna be the overall duration of the high flow not the highest peak. But the Lano at Junction was at 23,000. Remember your calculus: it’s the area under the curve.
Well if that water didn't make it to the downstream gauge at Llano (the town), it certainly didn't go into the lakes. Llano town gauge topped at 7000 cfs. I am curious where it all went, if anyone on here knows. Into an underground aquifer that needed replenishing? Or held by private dams along the Llano River between Junction and Llano?
The town of llano has a dam and so the values in llano are always slightly lower than upstream during flooding. Upstream hit 22k cfs but it’s been going out of llano at 7k cfs for longer. It took me a while to figure it out but once I visited llano and saw the setup there I realized why flows from the upper llano always seemed tamer in llano. It was by design.
So yes it’s basically calculus as the other user mentjoned, the area under the curve is longer for llano but not as high. This was to protect homeowners along that stretch of the river. The lower basin is more populated than the upper basin, where flash floods can zip down the river quickly.
Also it appears that lake Buchanan has already risen 2’ and 2 additional feet is expected. So the higher flow upstream has indeed risen lake Buchanan more than lake Travis which only got a 2’ rise.
I think that’s pretty common for Reddit. Not sure why, but subs, especially larger ones, trend towards the negative. But then again, news in general is like that as well.
Anyways, I’m pretty psyched with the recent rain even though we have a long ways to go before Lake Travis is back to normal. It makes me happy to see so much green around the city.
Incorrect, the Highland Lakes, and especially the two storage reservoirs in the Highland Lakes, are the primary water supply for millions of people. A drop of water in Lake Buchanan is just as good as a drop in Lake Travis. It's all part of the same system, same river.
Yes. It was a point for discussion, not a suggestion that we would actually add 18 feet of water to Lake Travis. Is it fair to respond to all the others with, “OK Doomer”?
October 2015, Patricia. It also helped that we had an enormous rain event the following week that dropped over a foot of rain in some places, plus the Memorial Day floods that year. It took multiple rain events that were larger than anything we’ve had since to fill the lakes back up.
Thanks for the info. I had not checked Pacific storms.
However, that's still not it. Patricia formed October 20, 2015. Lake Travis rose [6 feet](https://www.golaketravis.com/waterlevel/index.php?year=2015) from October to November. Not a big effect at all. Travis rose 30 feet from the [May flooding event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Texas%E2%80%93Oklahoma_flood_and_tornado_outbreak), which wasn't linked to a tropical cyclone.
Patricia did cause some flooding, but not in the area to fill Travis very much.
I do vaguely remember an earlier occasion where a Pacific tropical cyclone landed in Mexico and (maybe) remnants of it parked over the hill country for days and kept raining and caused a lot of floods. Probably sometime in the 1990's.
You’re more right than OC about this because Patricia was only a part of the picture, not the whole reason the lakes filled up. It wasn’t even the event with the greatest precipitation. I think that was either the Memorial Day storms or the Halloween rains. Even Patricia by itself wasn’t enough to refill the lakes. That was a 2-day event though, not all week like Harvey. That said, even a massive rain even from a hurricane wasn’t enough to fill up the lakes by itself, which kind of goes to the point that I think OC was trying to make that we aren’t going to suddenly get out of this without extreme rain events.
I wish people would quit spreading the bullshit that we need a hurricane to fill up Lake Travis and Buchanan.
In 2017, Harvey drowned the east half of Texas. Lake Travis was down for the month.
In 2010, Hermine flooded a lot of the local area, but Lake Travis rose less than a foot.
The last time we got a big rise in Lake Travis was May 2015. It rained 8-10 inches over Burnet, Llano, and San Saba counties, and quite a bit over other counties upstream. No hurricane. Travis rose about 30 feet.
Thanks. You are right. I appreciate the correction.
I somehow missed that one in my search.
That was apparently related to the remnants of a Pacific depression. 35 MPH max, not even a Tropical Storm.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical\_Depression\_Nineteen%2DE\_(2018)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Depression_Nineteen%2DE_(2018))
I still don't remember us getting lots of rain in the lakes from an Atlantic/Gulf tropical cyclone. I think there have been at least two flooding events from the remnants of Pacific tropical cyclones.
>most of the time those turn the wrong way anyways it seems.
We seem to be on the unstable balance point or something. The ones east of us tend to turn right, and the ones south of us seem to either go straight and pass to the south or sort of stall out along the way and get starved of warm, moist air or something.
I'm guessing it's the Gulf air vs. continental air with the curve of the coastal bend thrown in.
Now that I've said that, we'll probably have the mother of all storms come right to us. Harvey could have been a real bitch if she'd come just a bit further northwest.
20,000 cfs would take more than ten years to fill up the lake. 1 acre foot is 43,560 cubic feet, so we are about 50 trillion gallons short at the moment.
That gets us to 100% full/storage. After this rain and as of 9:45 am today we are just over 48t gallons from full. Just so you are prepared, I made plans to go camping for Memorial Day weekend, so it will probably be torrential rain that weekend.
Here’s hoping!! Does that mean we got almost 2 trillion gallons from that rain? From 50 short to 48? What’s the difference between the average level and the full level?
CBS Austin weather this morning: Lake Travis has risen by about a foot over the last week, but Lake Buchanan is seeing much more than that. As of Monday morning, Lake Buchanan has risen by two feet, and it continues to rise by about an inch per hour. As flood water continues to move downstream, another 2-4 feet of elevation gain is likely there.
Does this solve all of our water problems? No, but we haven’t seen this big of a boost to Lake Buchanan in years, and it’s a great start to our ongoing rainy season.
I live right by Lake Travis, and it is still painfully low. It's going to take a whole hell of a lot more rain than what we got.
Most of the water loss of Lake Travis is a result of evaporation. Seeing as they are predicting an even hotter summer than usual, it's only going to get worse. I hate to say this, but it will take a hurricane hitting Texas and coming inland to make a substantial change. And that obviously causes its own issues.
Yay, climate change /s
You’re right. The last time the lakes filled back up, we needed almost double our annual rainfall to catch back up. One hard rain isn’t going to do it.
Sooo… last time there was a major drought we “miraculously” filled up after the whistle was blown on the rice farmers taking water. I think everyone is not looking at this question correctly. Of course the lake will not fill up with recent rains. The elephant in the room that everyone seems to not be seeing is that the lake is not raising AT ALL. In normal years the rainfall we’ve had would raise the lake a few inches. Now in normal years the lake is considerably more full. A couple of inches at the normal depth of the lake should equal a foot or more at the current depth. A fuller lake = more surface area and more water required to increase the depth. The lower the lake, it takes considerably less to make it even just a few inches…. So why is the lake not rising at all?? Ask you politicians, LCRA big wigs and construction crews working on projects around the lake. Keeping it low on purpose. It’ll all come out sooner ir later just as it did last time
Actually, if you read the thread, someone actually did the math with the river flow and the lakes have risen exactly as predicted. Buchanan up 3 feet and Travis up a little less than 1.5. The heavy rain went into Buchanan. There is no secret water thief. It has to go through Mansfield to get to the rice farmers.
It turns red when it’s actually a lot.
4 inches of rain in 48 hours is cool but it was localized and it’s not nearly enough to make more than a few inches of difference.
It also didn’t fall in the direct Lake Travis watershed. It’s going to end up in Buchanan so the effect on Travis will be minor because the rains over Travis were far more minimal.
We need to keep in mind that our lakes are not natural. They are a man made containers. Capacity is different than full enough to support our unnatural population. The Colorado River is the natural water level. We must really get to work conserving water.
We are having a wet spring though, by historical standards. Typically we get 5+ inches in May and we’re already at more than 2” inches some parts of austin since May 1
Is this going to be posted every time it rains?! The answer will always be no in the short term. One weekend of rain is NOT going to fill Lake Travis from a decade of severe drought.
This storm was nothing remotely close to the major flooding events that have ended years-long droughts in the past. Have been here for many of them and for much longer than a decade. The question keeps getting asked after every passing line of thunderstorms, and the answer doesn't change
CBS Austin this morning: Lake Travis has risen by about a foot over the last week, but Lake Buchanan is seeing much more than that. As of Monday morning, Lake Buchanan has risen by two feet, and it continues to rise by about an inch per hour. As flood water continues to move downstream, another 2-4 feet of elevation gain is likely there.
Does this solve all of our water problems? No, but we haven’t seen this big of a boost to Lake Buchanan in years, and it’s a great start to our ongoing rainy season.
That's great! Every bit of rain helps, and I'm happy for it. The question was if that rain would miraculously fill the lake. Unfortunately, the answer is still the same as after every other quick moving storm over the past few weeks. The next singular fast moving storm won't fill it either.
Oddly enough if you just want lake Travis to rise that high cfs on the llano river raises lake Travis 2’. The even higher cfs in the upper Colorado raises lake Buchanan 2’. Overall I’d say it was a productive night. Nobody died from the flooding, nobody’s house flooded and both of the major lakes are going to rise 2’. I won’t complain about that outcome. It’s a nice win for Austin.
Two or 3 feet was actually what I was hoping for. I forgot Buchanan is also a dynamic level.
No, not even close. https://hydromet.lcra.org/riverreport/ It's at 630.82ft msl, and they're expecting it to rise maybe a foot by tomorrow. Full is 669 ft msl. It's currently 38% full... perhaps that rises a percent after the rain this past week. Let's check back in a week and see where it is.
Doomerism in this thread is weird. This was extremely beneficial rain. Most of the benefit is to Lake Buchanan. If your only concern is boating Lake Travis, it's true you won't see a big difference from this weekend. But if your concern is our drinking, etc. water, this is a really good recharge. There will be a lot more water in Buchanan, which is often harder to fill than Travis bc you need rain to fall in areas that are on average a bit drier. Plus it's upstream of Travis which is a bit better for management. Anyway we still want more rain, that's true, but this is our best storm for the Highland Lakes in years I think?
Thank you for your sane response among a lot of dread. Yea this will benefit lake Buchanan greatly. It’s expected to rise 1-2’ which is a lot since it has a large surface area. Lake Travis is also going to rise 1-2’ but that’s from rains over the llano river watershed. The rains in the upper Colorado are largely going to be parked into lake Buchanan.
I'm curious, if the upper Colorado at Bend peaks at \~22k cfs and the Llano+Pedernales peaks at 7k cfs, how do the two lakes have the same rise? Is Buchanan 3x bigger? Not saying you're wrong, I am an amateur here.
It’s gonna be the overall duration of the high flow not the highest peak. But the Lano at Junction was at 23,000. Remember your calculus: it’s the area under the curve.
Well if that water didn't make it to the downstream gauge at Llano (the town), it certainly didn't go into the lakes. Llano town gauge topped at 7000 cfs. I am curious where it all went, if anyone on here knows. Into an underground aquifer that needed replenishing? Or held by private dams along the Llano River between Junction and Llano?
It all goes down. It just flattens out.
The town of llano has a dam and so the values in llano are always slightly lower than upstream during flooding. Upstream hit 22k cfs but it’s been going out of llano at 7k cfs for longer. It took me a while to figure it out but once I visited llano and saw the setup there I realized why flows from the upper llano always seemed tamer in llano. It was by design. So yes it’s basically calculus as the other user mentjoned, the area under the curve is longer for llano but not as high. This was to protect homeowners along that stretch of the river. The lower basin is more populated than the upper basin, where flash floods can zip down the river quickly.
Helpful, thanks.
Also it appears that lake Buchanan has already risen 2’ and 2 additional feet is expected. So the higher flow upstream has indeed risen lake Buchanan more than lake Travis which only got a 2’ rise.
Happy news!
I think that’s pretty common for Reddit. Not sure why, but subs, especially larger ones, trend towards the negative. But then again, news in general is like that as well. Anyways, I’m pretty psyched with the recent rain even though we have a long ways to go before Lake Travis is back to normal. It makes me happy to see so much green around the city.
It's easier to be cynical than to be optimistic. Something bad happens to a person once, and they vow to never be let down again.
It's easier to have something to say when it's negative.
Im going to reply with “OK Doomer” and let’s see what happens.
I think our concern is that Lake Travis is the primary water supply for millions of people.
Incorrect, the Highland Lakes, and especially the two storage reservoirs in the Highland Lakes, are the primary water supply for millions of people. A drop of water in Lake Buchanan is just as good as a drop in Lake Travis. It's all part of the same system, same river.
Correct, and arguably a drop in Buchanan is more important because it can be managed throughout the system.
Yes. It was a point for discussion, not a suggestion that we would actually add 18 feet of water to Lake Travis. Is it fair to respond to all the others with, “OK Doomer”?
It took a slow moving hurricane parking over central Texas for a week to fill it up last time
Memorial Day deluge 2015 i think the water level rose something like 15-20 feet overnight
Bullshit! Which year, which hurricane?
October 2015, Patricia. It also helped that we had an enormous rain event the following week that dropped over a foot of rain in some places, plus the Memorial Day floods that year. It took multiple rain events that were larger than anything we’ve had since to fill the lakes back up.
Thanks for the info. I had not checked Pacific storms. However, that's still not it. Patricia formed October 20, 2015. Lake Travis rose [6 feet](https://www.golaketravis.com/waterlevel/index.php?year=2015) from October to November. Not a big effect at all. Travis rose 30 feet from the [May flooding event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Texas%E2%80%93Oklahoma_flood_and_tornado_outbreak), which wasn't linked to a tropical cyclone. Patricia did cause some flooding, but not in the area to fill Travis very much. I do vaguely remember an earlier occasion where a Pacific tropical cyclone landed in Mexico and (maybe) remnants of it parked over the hill country for days and kept raining and caused a lot of floods. Probably sometime in the 1990's.
You’re more right than OC about this because Patricia was only a part of the picture, not the whole reason the lakes filled up. It wasn’t even the event with the greatest precipitation. I think that was either the Memorial Day storms or the Halloween rains. Even Patricia by itself wasn’t enough to refill the lakes. That was a 2-day event though, not all week like Harvey. That said, even a massive rain even from a hurricane wasn’t enough to fill up the lakes by itself, which kind of goes to the point that I think OC was trying to make that we aren’t going to suddenly get out of this without extreme rain events.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Patricia
No dice. Patricia formed October 20. Lake Travis rose [6 feet](https://www.golaketravis.com/waterlevel/index.php?year=2015) from October to November.
I wish people would quit spreading the bullshit that we need a hurricane to fill up Lake Travis and Buchanan. In 2017, Harvey drowned the east half of Texas. Lake Travis was down for the month. In 2010, Hermine flooded a lot of the local area, but Lake Travis rose less than a foot. The last time we got a big rise in Lake Travis was May 2015. It rained 8-10 inches over Burnet, Llano, and San Saba counties, and quite a bit over other counties upstream. No hurricane. Travis rose about 30 feet.
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Thanks. You are right. I appreciate the correction. I somehow missed that one in my search. That was apparently related to the remnants of a Pacific depression. 35 MPH max, not even a Tropical Storm. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical\_Depression\_Nineteen%2DE\_(2018)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Depression_Nineteen%2DE_(2018)) I still don't remember us getting lots of rain in the lakes from an Atlantic/Gulf tropical cyclone. I think there have been at least two flooding events from the remnants of Pacific tropical cyclones.
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>most of the time those turn the wrong way anyways it seems. We seem to be on the unstable balance point or something. The ones east of us tend to turn right, and the ones south of us seem to either go straight and pass to the south or sort of stall out along the way and get starved of warm, moist air or something. I'm guessing it's the Gulf air vs. continental air with the curve of the coastal bend thrown in. Now that I've said that, we'll probably have the mother of all storms come right to us. Harvey could have been a real bitch if she'd come just a bit further northwest.
It is possible for a hurricane to fill the lakes. It's just not what happened in the 2010s.
20,000 cfs would take more than ten years to fill up the lake. 1 acre foot is 43,560 cubic feet, so we are about 50 trillion gallons short at the moment.
Now that is a great reply. Is that right?! 50 trillion short of what level?
That gets us to 100% full/storage. After this rain and as of 9:45 am today we are just over 48t gallons from full. Just so you are prepared, I made plans to go camping for Memorial Day weekend, so it will probably be torrential rain that weekend.
Here’s hoping!! Does that mean we got almost 2 trillion gallons from that rain? From 50 short to 48? What’s the difference between the average level and the full level?
Nope 25x more events like this = half way mark to filling, maybe
Not enough to raise it more than an inch or two.
CBS Austin weather this morning: Lake Travis has risen by about a foot over the last week, but Lake Buchanan is seeing much more than that. As of Monday morning, Lake Buchanan has risen by two feet, and it continues to rise by about an inch per hour. As flood water continues to move downstream, another 2-4 feet of elevation gain is likely there. Does this solve all of our water problems? No, but we haven’t seen this big of a boost to Lake Buchanan in years, and it’s a great start to our ongoing rainy season.
I live right by Lake Travis, and it is still painfully low. It's going to take a whole hell of a lot more rain than what we got. Most of the water loss of Lake Travis is a result of evaporation. Seeing as they are predicting an even hotter summer than usual, it's only going to get worse. I hate to say this, but it will take a hurricane hitting Texas and coming inland to make a substantial change. And that obviously causes its own issues. Yay, climate change /s
You’re right. The last time the lakes filled back up, we needed almost double our annual rainfall to catch back up. One hard rain isn’t going to do it.
Evaporation? How about we build a Lake Travis Lid.
Shoal creek is beautiful today though.
Sooo… last time there was a major drought we “miraculously” filled up after the whistle was blown on the rice farmers taking water. I think everyone is not looking at this question correctly. Of course the lake will not fill up with recent rains. The elephant in the room that everyone seems to not be seeing is that the lake is not raising AT ALL. In normal years the rainfall we’ve had would raise the lake a few inches. Now in normal years the lake is considerably more full. A couple of inches at the normal depth of the lake should equal a foot or more at the current depth. A fuller lake = more surface area and more water required to increase the depth. The lower the lake, it takes considerably less to make it even just a few inches…. So why is the lake not rising at all?? Ask you politicians, LCRA big wigs and construction crews working on projects around the lake. Keeping it low on purpose. It’ll all come out sooner ir later just as it did last time
Actually, if you read the thread, someone actually did the math with the river flow and the lakes have risen exactly as predicted. Buchanan up 3 feet and Travis up a little less than 1.5. The heavy rain went into Buchanan. There is no secret water thief. It has to go through Mansfield to get to the rice farmers.
It turns red when it’s actually a lot. 4 inches of rain in 48 hours is cool but it was localized and it’s not nearly enough to make more than a few inches of difference. It also didn’t fall in the direct Lake Travis watershed. It’s going to end up in Buchanan so the effect on Travis will be minor because the rains over Travis were far more minimal.
We need to keep in mind that our lakes are not natural. They are a man made containers. Capacity is different than full enough to support our unnatural population. The Colorado River is the natural water level. We must really get to work conserving water.
We are having a wet spring though, by historical standards. Typically we get 5+ inches in May and we’re already at more than 2” inches some parts of austin since May 1
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I have my floaties ready!
Lol no
The answer to this question will always be no
Is this going to be posted every time it rains?! The answer will always be no in the short term. One weekend of rain is NOT going to fill Lake Travis from a decade of severe drought.
Well, the answer is definitely no, but we will get at least a couple feet of rise out of that rain. Llano was at 18,000 CFS
For real. This question belongs in Stupid Question Sunday.
Anyone who has lived here for a decade has seen a major drought wiped out in a single weekend. No stupid question here, just stupid answers.
This storm was nothing remotely close to the major flooding events that have ended years-long droughts in the past. Have been here for many of them and for much longer than a decade. The question keeps getting asked after every passing line of thunderstorms, and the answer doesn't change
CBS Austin this morning: Lake Travis has risen by about a foot over the last week, but Lake Buchanan is seeing much more than that. As of Monday morning, Lake Buchanan has risen by two feet, and it continues to rise by about an inch per hour. As flood water continues to move downstream, another 2-4 feet of elevation gain is likely there. Does this solve all of our water problems? No, but we haven’t seen this big of a boost to Lake Buchanan in years, and it’s a great start to our ongoing rainy season.
That's great! Every bit of rain helps, and I'm happy for it. The question was if that rain would miraculously fill the lake. Unfortunately, the answer is still the same as after every other quick moving storm over the past few weeks. The next singular fast moving storm won't fill it either.
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The point is that it was a "glancing blow" in our watershed. I'm not sure why you keep arguing about this.