Oswego Snow

Factual Questions
1

With the 100+ inch snow up in Oswego, NY do they predict problems with flooding come this spring?

2

I wouldn’t be surprised.

I wonder wheter this will mean high water levels in Lake Ontario? I believe the Seaway Authority regulates the level of Lake Ontario at a dam on the St. Lawrence River downstream from Kingstion, though, so I’m not sure.

:: more drinking water for Toronto! Yay! ::

  • ahem* Sorry.
3

Since all the snow came from Lake Ontario, I can’t imagine that it’s going to raise the water level any. It’s a lot of snow, to be sure, but the moisture content is supposedly very low, so it probably won’t amount to huge amounts of runoff.

4

Yes and no.

There will probably be little if any flooding in the City of Oswego, at the mouth of the Oswego River, and none for 20 miles or so upstream, where the river flows through a gorge. However, there will be three areas that are likely to experience significant flooding:

  1. The lower courses of the Salmon and Little Salmon Rivers, draining the specific area which got the most snowfall. The town(ship)s of Mexico and Richland are at risk here.

  2. The shores of Oneida Lake, south of the heavy-snow area. The reason for this is that much of the interior drains into several streams, notably the two branches of Fish Creek and its tributaries, and that lake is bordered by lowlying land studded with resorts and cottages. Two years ago I completed a land use study for Sylvan Beach, at the east end of the lake, which identified Federal flood hazard areas and took note of a flood that inundated much of the current village (then largely not built up) about 100 years ago. Much of the rest of the shores of Oneida Lake are similarly flood hazard areas.

  3. Oddly, substantial parts of the area between Lowville and Carthage northeast of the heavy snow area. The reason here is that the east (and highest) part of the Tug Hill Plateau (actually a cuesta) drains into the Black River to the east of the plateau. And that section of land is already subject to spring floods from normal area snowfall, owing to the fact that the river crosses a nearly flat plain-like area of its valley there. What this extreme snowfall will do remains to be seen.

5

I agree.

Here in Minnesota, we have been known to get a lot of snow some years.

Whether that leads to flooding depends on the Spring melt.
In many years, it slowly gets warmer each day (but drops down again at night). In those cases, the snow melts slowly & consistently, and generally the land drainage is able to absorb it over time without flooding.

But if it stays cold, and then suddenly turns warm & stays warm, all the snow may melt quickly, and overwhelm the land drainage pattern. In that case, you will get flooding.

6

It also depends a lot on how fast it melts…

7

I wonder, though, if this brings their snow pack to a higher than average level, since there was practically no snow until this point, and multiple warmer periods in between. At least that was the case in Albany.

Which doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about purchasing a plane ticket for spring just to see the Ithaca waterfalls if I find out the snow got down thataway.

8

Clarification of my post above. Item #2 should have begun:

On rereading that I saw that editing on the fly had completely obfuscated why snowfall to the north might impact that lake heavily. Sorry!