Explanation for apparent 1,000cfs drop
Yesterday, the USGS graph (found here) showed a 1,000cfs drop in river releases when a drop of 500cfs was indicated. The good news is the river did indeed only dropped 500cfs as planned.
You may recall back when releases had climbed to 9,500cfs, a manual measurement near the Afterbay indicated flows were actually 9,000cfs, a discrepancy of 500cfs. Since the new gaging equipment at Afterbay had not been calibrated at flows that high, this slight discrepancy of 500cfs was not a surprise. However, to properly operate and calculate other parameters, an offset of 500cfs along with an increase in flows were put in place to balance things. Yesterday, this offset was removed from the system but briefly appeared in the USGS calculations for plotting the graph of river releases.
In summary, on Monday, the river dropped only the planned 500cfs.
