August 2016 Mini-Flood

The river has been in the news a lot in the last few days, with warnings of rapidly rising water levels. It peaked on the 25th, but here's what we saw over those few days:

Before this, it had been at around the 3~3.4m mark for days, but then over the course of about 36 hours it rose 3.3m (11') to reach 6.8m. And with the increase in depth, the flow jumped from about 200m3/s to 1,400m3/s.

I don't have much in the way of historical data for river flows, but here is the Alberta Environment chart of river flow for the year:

Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development > North Saskatchewan River at Edmonton(05DF001)
http://www.environment.alberta.ca/apps/basins/DisplayData.aspx?Type=Figure&BasinID=4&DataType=1&StationID=RNSASEDM

The most unusual thing about this flood is that it happened in August, while floods are normally supposed to take place in June.

Here is a comparison of this 2016 mini-flood to the one that peaked on June 23 2016:

I wasn't sure quite how to line these up, so I've matched the peaks: 11am June 23 2013 lines up with midnight August 25 2016.

The June 2013 mini-flood was much larger. It started a little higher - 4m & 350m3/s - and it peaked much, much higher at 9.5m and 2,900m3/s.

This year's miniflood was quite a bit faster though, with levels increasing from 3.5m to 6m in just 12 hours. That's 2.5m (8'), while back in 2013 the largest 12 hour increase was only 1.4m (4.5').