In order to cement my status as a bona fide data scientist, I took some time this evening to run "historic" water level queries, for the Fraser River at Hope going back 80 yrs to 1944. (caveat: some data was missing for the winter months in the early 1950's)
Only in one year (2001) did the monthly water level ever get below 3.0 m. In that year, the water got below 3.0 for about six wks but the three month average (Jan-Mar) would have been greater than 3.0
Compare that to 2023 Jan to March when the river only had one blip above 3.0m and averaged around 2.7m.
The persistent low flows can't be attributed to a snowpack that hasn't started to melt.
Draw your own conclusions...
That's a little bit better. 80 years of research at least has a little meat on the bone. 10 years does NOT
Ok....let's look at this as best we can.
1. We are talking about a difference of about 30 centimeters in water levels. A crazy new record? No. Significant enough to mention? Yes
2. The Fraser watershed at this time of year has pretty much zero water being removed anywhere in the watershed, and the little that might be would not vary enough to make a difference in winter.
The first things we would look at for this time of year is snowmelt and fall/winter rainfall.
The Fraser watershed over that period was very dry. The snowmelt is late. Also, the low/mid elevation snowmelt is late....and that quite often makes the biggest difference. Put that together with a dry fall/winter....and I'm not surprised that even over 80 years we have record low waterflows for early April. I'm really not surprised at all.
If that isn't enough though.....what else is left? Not much.
In fact the only thing I can think about here is perhaps the large amount of forest fires in the last few years have left a lot of the watershed slopes really bare...in turn not holding as much of the winter water as we'd expect. So in late fall/early winter......the water all ran off then instead of being held in the normally forested slopes...
But I can't provide data that is concrete on that.
Bottom line is that water just doesn't disappear in the cool season. I truly believe it is a combination of a drier fall/winter with a very delayed snowpack in all elevations.