Zeke Lunder ~ The Lookout Profile picture
Communicator covering water and wildfire. Working in forests since 1990. Qualified Ca. Burn Boss Intel = public data. Photos by me. Fire is the best teacher.

Jan 21, 2023, 6 tweets

First cloud-free #Sentinel2 satellite images in a month dropped yesterday. Great to check out snow levels, reservoirs, and wet wet wet in the Butte Basin/Lower Sacramento River. First image compares Colusa area now vs 12/15/2022. #Geography #RemoteSensing #CaWx #CaStorm 1/x

Imagery paints a picture of soil types. Along the River, coarser soils settle quickly once floodwaters slow down. Blue areas have more clay, because super-fine soil particles can stay suspended longer, travel farther in slow-moving floodwaters. Orchards prefer coarse soils. 2/x

Plumes of sediment from the Pajaro and Salinas Rivers are still very visible in the Monterey Bay on 1/19/2023. Two visualizations of sediment in the lower Delta and San Pablo Bay. 3/x

This image shows rice fields in the Northern Sacramento Valley (blue areas). Similarly to the Butte Basin, rice lands in Yuba County (lower-left) are in the longterm floodplain of the Feather and Yuba Rivers while orchards predominate in coarse soils along the Feather River. 4/x

Reservoir levels at Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville - 12/15/22 vs 1/19/2023. #CaWx #CaStorm #CaWater #Sentinel2 5/x

The 'tailwater' from rice on the west side of the Sac Valley (south of about Willows) eventually ends up in the main 'Westside Drain' which dumps back into the Sac River around Knights Landing. This foaming brew flows into the Delta and we pump it south for people to drink. 6/x

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