To the FWGNA group,

It's raining here in Charleston this morning, again.  The wettest spring on record for South Carolina is yielding to a very wet summer, and meanwhile, tropical storms are beginning to come ashore in the southeast.

I had big plans for fieldwork this summer, primarily in the Carolinas and Virginia.  But the water levels have simply been too high.  Last week I spoke with my good friend Paul Johnson on the telephone, and he reports a similar situation in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee.

If you've ever known the frustration of travelling long distances to sample streams that were simply too high to work, here's a site that should be on your bookmark list:
http://water.usgs.gov/waterwatch/

The USGS has really put our tax dollars to good use in the construction of this marvelous resource.  Here real-time data from several thousand river gauging stations are just a click away.  And since the USGS has been monitoring river height and flow for many years, present water levels can be placed in their historical perspective.  Visitors to the "waterwatch" site can verify at a glance, for example, that the entire southeastern United States is currently experiencing river stages higher than 90% of record.  One might then zoom in to select a particular station, and (in many cases) get a ton of detailed statistics including daily, monthly, and annual historical data in a variety of formats.  Just for kicks (since you're bored anyway) try that "surf your watershed" link to go over to the EPA site corresponding to any gauge.

But returning back out to our continental perspective, it appears that many of you in the west and northwest are suffering an unusually dry summer.  Perhaps some of us twiddling our thumbs in the east should consider migrating westward for our field seasons.  And shall each of us bring a couple buckets of water with us?

Keep in touch,
Rob