Sunday, August 02, 2009 9:32 AM
Sam Chapman
How Fast Can Lake Travis Fill Up?
People are anxious about the level of Lake Travis and the drought. Florida Gal, who has left comments on my blog, commented about the lake being so low and how glad she was that she didn't buy here. She is OK to take her chances with hurricanes. Many of us who have lived in the Austin area for a while understand that Lake Travis fluctuaties and we're OK with that.
A lot of people are wondering when the lake will be full again. It will fill up again and will probably flood at times. I just took some data from the LCRA for 1991, plugged it into Excel and created the graph to the left.
The flood of December, 1991 was a result of El Nino causing excessive rain in our area and to the west. According to an LCRA article dated December, 2006, 8-12 inches fell over an already saturated area and that caused massive amounts of water to flow into Lake Travis. If that kind of rain had fallen at that time when the lake was quite low, the LCRA estimated that the lake could have risen 55 feet. That was an El Nino year as well.
I'm not suggesting that I want flooding rain, but when we get enough rain over a large enough geographic area, the lake will fill up again. El Nino is back and it is expected to bring rain late this fall and this winter. It may or may not be enough to fill Lake Travis, but it should help bust the drought.
Update on Sept. 20: central Texas and the Hill Country had some great rain last week. The area got anywhere from one to 7 inches of rain in about 4 days. However, it did very little for Lake Travis even though a lot of it fell in areas that flow into the lake. Why? The ground was so unbelievable parched, most of the rain just soaked in. So what it is actually going to take to refill Lake Travis will be several rain events like that with not much of a break in between. Unless the ground becomes saturated, future rain won't run off.
Update again on Sept. 29 - much of the area continues to get rain about once a week. This is causing the ground to retain enough moisture so if we get enough rain, it will run off and lakes will either stop dropping or start rising.
Update on June 30: we have seen some nice rainfall in the area thanks to a late season cool front. Now we also have Hurricane Alex looking to dump heavy rain in south Texas, but it looks like central Texas will get isolated heavy rain. This should help keep Lake Travis at a healthy level thi ssummer.
