Exploratory: generated automatically from the UmaTerra platforms' data; not independently validated or peer reviewed.

UmaTerra · story Português
Water · farms · climate · Canada

British Columbia, November 2021: the atmospheric river that brought a lake back

Between 13 and 15 November 2021 an atmospheric river poured two days of rain onto southern British Columbia. Rivers broke their banks on both sides of the border, and Sumas Prairie, a farm plain built on the bed of a lake drained a century ago, filled with water again. Clouds hid the valley, so this story reads the flood with radar, follows the rivers at their gauges, and reads the climate ahead and La Niña in climate-shift.

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—of new water in the frame on 16 November estimated
—of the 5 km Sumas Prairie circle under water estimated
—of rain in 4 days on the prairie's cell, by satellite estimated
—peak flow of the Nooksack at Ferndale measured

measured by satellite, by a gauge or from the geometry itself. estimated projected by climate models, or a reading that depends on a threshold. missing a part that did not respond this time.

1

A plain that was a lake

This story runs on climate-shift, on the US and Canadian river gauges, and on satellite layers prepared for this page in Earth Engine.

2

A river in the sky

NASA's IMERG estimates the rain every half hour from a constellation of satellites; here it is summed every three hours.

3

Rivers on both sides of the border

One USGS gauge on the Nooksack in Washington, and two Water Survey of Canada stations by daily mean.

4

Big, but not the biggest

The darkest bar is 2021.

5

Before, through the clouds

Sentinel-1 sends its own microwaves and listens for the echo, day or night, cloud or not.

6

The lake comes back

The same orbit, the same angle, twelve days later.

7

The farms under water

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada maps every field's crop each year from satellite.

8

Slow to leave

In pale blue, what was still under water at the next pass.

9

The land in the circle

climate-shift follows every pixel of the 5 km circle in the AAFC inventory.

10

The rain ahead

What nine climate models project for this place by 2041–2070.

11

La Niña

climate-shift's ENSO tabs: the phase of the Pacific, and what each phase has done to the winter rain here.

12

The app's own words

climate-shift writes a short reading of every circle from its numbers.

13

Where every number came from

Every number on this page comes from a public service or dataset, listed here.

umaterra.com.br · Sumas Prairie 2021
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What this story does not say

Another story from British Columbia: West Kelowna, 2023 →

Written with Claude Opus 5.5, by Anthropic, from the numbers Earth Engine, the USGS, the Water Survey of Canada and climate-shift computed: no number comes from the model. Versão em português.

Notes

  1. IMERG spreads the rain over ~10 km cells and is known to read low over mountains and where rain and snow mix, as in the Coast and Cascade ranges. Times are local (PST, UTC−8). GPM IMERG V07, half-hourly; Huffman et al. (2023), NASA.
  2. The Nooksack's flow is USGS data (cubic feet per second converted to m³/s; local time, PST). The Canadian stations are Water Survey of Canada daily means; a day without flow is a day the station did not report it. USGS NWIS site 12213100; Water Survey of Canada stations 08MH029 and 08MH001 (api.weather.gc.ca).
  3. Flooded: VV backscatter below −16 dB that fell by more than 3 dB since 4 November, on ground that was not water before (JRC occurrence ≤ 50%), after a 30 m focal median. Same orbit (13) and look angle on all three dates. A threshold reading: it misses water among buildings and under trees. Sentinel-1 GRD, ESA Copernicus; Pekel et al. (2016), JRC Global Surface Water.
  4. climate-shift's projections are the median of nine NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 models (~25 km), 1985–2014 against 2041–2070. "Wettest day" is rx1day, the largest one-day total of each year, averaged. Thrasher et al. (2022), NEX-GDDP-CMIP6.