The Majesty of a February Snowstorm

I'd like to invite you into a magical experience of a winter's night. I encourage you to look at each photo for at least a few seconds before reading the text that follows...I think you'll enjoy what I've written more if you take some time to take in the scene as well.

Yesterday I posted about the February 8-9 2013 blizzard from a more analytical point of view, looking at the storm through my meteorologist's lens. Today, though, it's a more personal look at the storm and my experience of it.  I knew that the snow would be winding down late Friday night, so I decided to wait until late to go outside and shovel.  There's something magical about being outside, alone, in a freshly fallen snow.  My original plan was to somewhat quickly shovel about half of the driveway, snap some shots for the blog, and leave the rest for Saturday.  But this was while my view of the night and its power was still blurry.

After a little while outside though, I realized that I wasn't getting cold, and I decided to take my time and bask in the glory of a late-night dwindling snowstorm.  It was still snowing a little bit, but I could certainly get away with shoveling it all now and not having to do another round the next morning.  My vision - not my eyesight, my vision - began to clear.  I could see the value of enjoying the moment, of taking in the sights, sounds, and thoughts of a quiet winter's night.  And a whole new world opened to me.

I looked back at my house, where I still have some holiday lights on.  (The kitchen light was streaming through a side window, too.)  I remembered why I've left the lights on.  It was to help me to get through the long, cold, dark winter.  Yes, the winter is still cold, and it's certainly been dragging on long enough.  But I can see that the sunsets are slowly getting later, the days are getting longer, and the sun is peeking through the clouds a little more frequently.  Today, a couple of days in the wake of the storm, was a rare sunny day in Freeville. 

By now, the roads were in fairly good shape, covered with a thin, packed coating of snow that provided some traction.  For the whole hour-plus that I was outside, I didn't see a single plow.  Well, I didn't see a single MUNICIPAL plow...there were a couple of private trucks with plows on the front that were either going from one job to the next or headed home after a long evening of clearing parking lots.  I only saw a few cars going by while I was out there...certainly less than on a typical Friday night.  Normally, I get a bit upset when people come flying through Freeville, but it didn't bother me one bit to see a truck hitting the pedal a bit too hard on this night.  It was strange: because it was so quiet, I felt a connectedness with the folks whizzing by and even timidly flashed a quick wave at a couple of the folks driving past.

But the whole reason that I was outside was to clear the driveway.  And as I usually am when I have a task to do that I don't particularly want to do, I was methodical about it.  I started by clearing a path on each side of the driveway, so that I could easily push strips of snow from one side to the other.  I worked my way from the street towards the car.  I would normally park out by the street so that I only need to clear by the car and fashion myself a path from the front door to the car...this would give me as much time as I want to shovel out the rest of the driveway.   But I didn't do that this time, and it allowed me to experience more of the snowstorm.  By the way, most of these photos are re-touched.  The originals were pretty terrible, and I had to adjust the brightness and contrast.  For this one, I also put it in grayscale to take out the yellow-orange afterglow of the streetlights.  Snow should look white, right?

There's a bit of a mystery for me here in Freeville.  Well, if you've been reading the blog for a while, you probably know that there are quite a few mysteries for me here in Freeville.  But the one I'm referring to now is the one in this picture.  After every snowstorm, the Great Snowblower of Freeville ventures out into the elements and clears Freeville's sidewalks of snow.  At first, I thought it was whoever clears the post office's sidewalks being nice and clearing a few neighboring sidewalks.  But no, it's both sides of the street, for as far as I could see last night.  So to the Great Snowblower of Freeville: I have no idea who you are, but thank you.

One of the nice things about this snow was that it wasn't too heavy.  The convenient thing about this is that it was fairly easy to push and lift the snow with my shovel.  Even though we had about 8.5" on the ground, it was fairly easy work.  Because the snow was dry and fluffy, though, I had to abort my attempt to build a snowman on Saturday night, and fairly quickly (because I wasn't getting anywhere).  And on Friday night, when I was shoveling, I couldn't secure my shovel in the snow by the side of the driveway.  In the photo above, I had stuck the shovel in the snow but had to quickly pull it up before it toppled over.

But out in the pile of snow left by the Great Snowblower of Freeville, the snow was deep and dense enough to secure my shovel.

It's funny how your experience of things in the moment and your memory of them after the fact are usually pretty different.  In this photo, I've pretty blatantly changed the color scheme, so that what was once a yellowish-orange tinge is now a cool, pale blue.  But if you hadn't seen the other photos, you could easily believe that this was the way it looked, yes?  In fact, as I was re-touching this photo, I thought that this looked "right"...for a moment there, my memory of the colors of the actual experience - and the photos I'd been working on - was completely lost.

But here's the mailbox in "true color".  The photo's only been retouched for contrast and brightness, because the original was a bit dim.  Pretty easy to tell which way the wind was blowing, yes?

One of the other mysteries of the night for me were these small "footprints" in the snow.  I knew they weren't actually footprints.  I've seen bare paths in the snow-covered grass at Cornell above underground heating pipes, and I wondered if these little depressions might have been caused by something similar.  But a stirring of the air led me to the only possible conclusion - these were the footprints of the wind.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the night for me was that I was outside in this tremendous snowstorm, and yet for much of that time, there was little to no wind.  Of course, I knew that I was far from the roiling center of the storm offshore of New England...but it was still strange to be amid such a peaceful setting when I knew that nature's fury was boiling over only a few hundred miles away.  There were times, though, when gusts of wind blew through.  I could hear them rustling through the trees; I could see them knocking little snowballs off of the branches and power lines, making footprints where they landed in the snow; and I could, at times, feel the powder whipping against my face as the flakes were brushed off the branches by a gentler breeze.

Once I started paying attention to the wind, it seemed to be almost toying with me (and the flag at the post office)...perfectly calm one instant...but flaring up quickly in the next.

By this point, my mind - like the snow when a gust came along - was blown.  But in a good way.  I was feeling appreciation for the beauty of the snow, for the mystery of the wind, for the experience of a winter's night.  I felt a connectedness with it all, much like the intertwining snow-covered branches of the trees.

At one point, a van approached, but instead of continuing on down the road, it stopped in front of the bus station.  I had an idea of what the man (or woman) in the van was up to, but a little later, I wanted to be sure...

Yup, it was the delivery of Saturday's Ithaca Journal.  I'm sure the snowstorm was front page news!

I wandered back home knowing that I was done my share of cleaning up from the storm, but also knowing that plenty of folks out there had more work to do.   Here in Freeville, the parking lot at the post office still had to be plowed.

Before I headed inside, I took in my freshly cleared driveway and the sights and sounds of a majestic snowstorm's night...just one more time.

February 2013 Nor'easter: A Meteorologist's View

The blizzard of February 8-9 2013 will be remembered differently depending on where it was experienced.  My many friends in the Philadelphia region saw it largely as an over-hyped dud, with just a few inches of snow that fell mostly overnight, barely affecting their lives.  But for some of my friends in Connecticut and Massachusetts, who are faced with snow drifts up to three or four feet - and I've seen pictures of drifts up to five feet - it's a storm that they'll spend hours digging out of, a storm that they'll remember for a long time.

Here in central New York, it was just another winter snowstorm, as nor'easters typically are for us.  We tend to be on the fringe of the storm (as we were with this one), so we tend to avoid the strongest winds and the heaviest snowbands.  In this post, I'll share some images of the storm from a meteorologist's point of view, and tomorrow, I'll be sharing some of my own photos and experiences of the storm. 


The above image, and the few like it that follow, was produced by a meteorological model.  I'll probably post more extensively on these models at some point in the future, but for now, you should just know that models are the key to the improvements in forecasting over the past few decades.  Forecasters rely on a combination of models, current and past observations of atmospheric conditions, and their own past experience and insights to put together a forecast.  These images all show simulated (or predicted) radar reflectivity: the bluer colors show lighter precipitation (pretty much all snow for this storm), and the yellow-to-orange colors show heavier precipitation.  The green colors represent moderate precipitation.  The above image is for 1:00 pm local time on Friday.



These images are all three hours apart, so this one shows the same thing as above - radar reflectivity - except three hours later.  Can you see how the storm is evolving?  In the first image, there were two relatively distinct areas of green, one pivoting around the eastern Great Lakes (Lake Ontario and Lake Erie) and the other has the highest precipitation intensity off of the southern Delaware coast.  In the image here, the first area is sliding to the east, while the second area is working its way north.  The coastal storm - the nor'easter - is the stronger of the two, and eventually the energy of the weaker storm coming from the Great Lakes will be absorbed into the coastal storm, making it that much stronger.


Here we are three hours later, and now it's much harder to tell that this was originally two storms.  The coastal storm has strengthened, for a number of reasons - which I won't get into here, because they aren't apparent in this image.  But what is apparent in this image is the greater intensity of the snow, which you can see in the ribbon of orange extending across parts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  Snowstorms tend to form bands of heavier snow, and you can see that the model is simulating a couple of bands: the stripes of orange and yellow.  There's also a weaker north-to-south band of darker green extending across central New York, right along the Interstate 81 corridor...this is a little bit east of Freeville.


Now we're getting into Friday night - 10 pm to be exact - and snowfall is expected to be kicking in for my friends in the Philadelphia area.  Meanwhile, the heavier snow in New York State is slowly migrating east, and the band that had been over southern New England a few hours ago is slowly migrating north.  Overall, the snow is in one continuous shield extending from western New York, south to southern New Jersey, north to southern Maine, and east well out into the Atlantic Ocean, where winds are certainly howling by this point.  According to the model, this is about when the storm, as a whole, was expected to be at its peak.

Three hours later, at 1:00 am, when most have gone to bed but the weather weenies are still awake following the storm, it continues to slide off to the northeast.  Nor'easters, by the way, are named for the winds that blow from the northeast when the storm is off the coast.  You can see this, in a roundabout way, in the north-northeast-to-south-southwest orientation of the thin orange snowband around the Boston area in this image.  Here in central New York, as well as for my friends in the Philadelphia area, the storm was expected to be winding down by now, though it is still raging over much of New England.


And finally, at 4 am, central New York is cleared of the snow (the blue colors indicate snow that isn't reaching the ground or possibly flurries), while the heaviest snow is slowly exiting New England.  The model expected the heaviest snow, overall, to fall around the Boston area, with quite a bit for parts of southern New England - Connecticut, Rhode Island, southeastern Massachusetts - as well.


Here's a picture that I nabbed off of Facebook from a friend who works for the National Weather Service office in Gray, ME (near Portland).  NWS employees know how to prepare for this kind of weather - the offices usually have extra staffing, and they may well have to spend the night.



Here's a forecast graphic provided by the Binghamton NWS office on Friday morning.  Notice how the map shows the two storms converging - the western storm is sliding from the western edge of the map toward the east, and the eastern storm will be growing in intensity and size as it slides roughly from south to north, so snow also moves from the eastern edge of the map towards the center.


A few hours later, in the early afternoon, they provided an update to the earlier graphic.  You can see some updates to the map, but perhaps more importantly, they've better pinned down the timing of the snowfall, as you can see in the text to the left.  Now that the storm is in progress, the forecasters can see how well reality is (or isn't) matching the models, and they can better pin down the timing and locations where they expect the heaviest snow.    To me, the bottom point is most important.  During snowstorms, it's not the total snowfall that's most important, but the snowfall rates - how fast the snow is falling....where and when.  If it falls too fast, the plows can't keep up.


I've got a couple of radar images here, just to show some differences between the model and reality.  You can see that the real radar is a lot "messier" than the model radar.  This is partly because the real radar shows a pixel - a point - every 1 km, while the model's pixel is much larger (I don't know exactly what it was, though).  This image is from 8:38 am local time, before any of the model images above, but you can still clearly see the two storms.


Here's the radar a few hours later, as of 12:18 pm local time.  The storms are moving ever so slightly closer together.  Going back to my point from above, another reason that model isn't as messy as reality is that it's designed to be that way.  Models can't calculate the movement of every molecule in the air, so they have to assume that the air over a certain "box "- anywhere from 1 km to 32 km or more - is more or less constant.  The models calculate the interactions between adjacent boxes, and they use approximations to simulate the processes that happen on smaller scales, within the box.  The result of this is that the model tends to smooth things out.  Just compare the yellow bands in this image to the yellow bands in the model-simulated radar above.  There's a lot more variation in color within the bands, and their edges are more ragged.  The models can simulate this kind of complexity, but for a storm like this, it's more important to focus on the bigger picture, so it's ok that the model looks smoother.


Here's the snowfall forecast from NWS Binghamton from 4 am on Friday.  For Ithaca, Freeville, and most of Tompkins county, we were expected to pick up about 6-8" from the storm, most of it coming late afternoon Friday through about 1 am Saturday.  Because the eastern storm was expected to ramp up in intensity and become dominant, the snowfall forecast increased from west to east.


Here's another picture I shamelessly grabbed from Facebook.  The caption: "Impressive features developing from the rapidly intensifying Nor'easter. The pressure has dropped 27.5 mb in less than 10 hours which classifies as bombogenesis. These look like gravity waves or internal atmospheric waves of some kind."  This happened early in the storm, when it was located off the coast near the Virginia/North Carolina border...well before it impacted New England.  It was originally posted by Brad Panovich, aTV meteorologist in Charlotte, NC.  

"Bombogenesis" is a rapid intensification of a storm.  It happens occasionally in really strong nor'easters, and it can result in some really high snowfall rates, lots of wind (there was a gust reported at Boston's Logan Airport of, I believe, 76 mph), and some really miserable people (as well as some very excited weather weenies).  Models, if they're running at high enough resolution (that is, with "boxes" small enough), can produce features like the gravity waves pointed out in this image, but the value is more in showing that they're possible, rather than making meteorologists overly concerned with their exact location and timing. 


And finally, now that you've probably had more than your fill of meteorology for one day, here's a look at some snowfall totals from the storm.  Guess whose snowfall report from 12:50 am was included in the list?


And here are some more snowfall totals!


In case you like maps better than numbers, here's a map of observed snowfall totals, from the Gray, ME NWS office.  You can see that the heaviest snowband set up just inland of the coast across southern Maine, then bent over towards central Massachusetts.  The heaviest snows from the storm, though, were in central Connecticut, where snowfall rates peaked around a ridiculous 6 inches per hour...I don't think the plows had any chance of keeping up with that!

...TOMPKINS COUNTY...
   GROTON                 9.8   715 AM  2/09  TRAINED SPOTTER
   ETNA                   9.5   430 AM  2/09  FACEBOOK
   DRYDEN                 9.0   730 AM  2/09  NWS FACEBOOK
   FREEVILLE              8.5   208 AM  2/09  FACEBOOK
   LANSING                8.2   800 AM  2/09  NWS FACEBOOK
   3 N FREEVILLE          8.0   740 AM  2/09  COCORAHS
   CAROLINE CENTER        7.3   732 AM  2/09  TRAINED SPOTTER
   DANBY                  6.8   819 AM  2/09  2.3 SINCE LAST EVE
   ITHACA                 5.5   930 AM  2/09  TRAINED SPOTTER

And finally, closer to home, here's a look at snowfall totals across the county. It snowed the most in the northeastern part of the county - Groton is 5.5 miles north of Freeville, Etna is a couple of 

miles south, and Dryden a couple of miles east. It snowed less in the southern part of the county (Caroline, Danby), but it snowed least in Ithaca, where the elevation is lowest. Elevation often has a big impact on snow totals, with higher elevations usually seeing more and lower elevations seeing less.

I hope you've enjoyed this look at the storm...come back tomorrow for photos from Freeville and a completely different perspective.

Freeville History: My House

My house lies in the heart of Freeville.  This wasn't always the case, though.  Freeville started at the south end of town, near the location of the old mill (and modern-day Mill Dam Park) and worked its way north through the valley.  My house, according to the realtor's listing, was built in 1930.   If you look at the structure, it somewhat resembles a house, now that a brick porch has been added onto the front and a stone patio onto the back.  But with its triangular roof and long, narrow shape, it also looks a bit like a small airplane hangar or maybe a workshop of some kind.  When I bought the house, I was determined to find out something about the history of the house.  As I got to know my property and saw the lay of the land, I realized that the neighbors' house and property had likely been carved out of my land.  Like the history of the house itself, I wondered if there was any significance to this arrangement.

To learn more, I got in touch with the village historian, who's provided me with plenty of information about the history of Freeville.  She sent me a nice letter (written in cursive, of course) with some information on my home, and we later met to discuss the history of Freeville and of my property.  The property was once owned by a gentleman by the name of George S. Monroe.  Apparently, the middle initial was important in the Monroe family, as there were many generations with the names of George and William.  George S. had two daughters, one of whom (Ruth) lived in the aforementioned house next door with her two children.  George himself lived in Freeville, on Railroad St. (what is today Rt. 38).

George's house burned down, so he moved in with his daughter and grandchildren, next door to the garage where he repaired carts and wagons for the railroad, from 1932 to the mid 1940s - my house!  I pointed out in an earlier post that Freeville was a major railroad hub in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so much of the town's commerce was linked in one way or another to the railroads.  It's neat to think that my house had as close a link as any.

After some time of living with his daughter and granddaughters, things weren't working out so well, so George decided to move out into his workshop and converted it into a house.  I'm sure the house he lived in and the one that I inhabit today are very different.  Several people have lived in the house since George passed on, including an upholsterer and an electrician.  In the house next door lived a family who ran a car garage repair shop on their property...the large garage is still there.  According to the village historian, they "didn't keep things very neat, so you might find most any thing out back."  And yes, as I've pointed out in other posts, there is still quite a bit of junk in my backyard.

So that's about all I know about the history of my property.  I hope you've enjoyed this look at the history of my little piece of Freeville.  When spring rolls around, I'll get back to searching for junk in the yard, and maybe I'll be able to trace the stories of some of those little pieces of history.


Note: It figures that one of the few days when I plan NOT to post about snow and cold turns out to be the day of our largest snowstorm (potentially) of the winter.  I'll be posting about it tomorrow.

Photo Series: Wandering Along the Icy Creek

I took a walk around Freeville this past weekend to see what the creek looks like in other places when there's ice on it.  I went down to Mill Dam Park and found that I wasn't the first one - human or animal - to have been there.

The water was still running fairly high, right over the concrete remains of the old dam.

Looking back upstream toward my dock, I found that the creek looked very similar to the way it does near my backyard, with ice on the edges and flowing water in the center.  I found, though, that compared to by my dock, there was very little ice floating in the water.

As I approached the park, I heard the trickling sound of running water.  It turns out that it was this little waterfall where the dam used to be.  I've decided that the steel rail (with handrail) that runs across the creek is there to allow folks to walk over to the small island on the other side of the creek.

It looks like a curious dog had beaten me to the edge of the dam.

Just downstream of the waterfall was a large sheet of ice with cracks in it.  I'm guessing that the cracks were caused by the pressure of the onrushing water.

Here's a look at the water snaking around the other side of the island and merging into the main body of the creek.

I decided to use the zoom feature of my camera to look upstream in the direction of my dock.  See how much ice there is on the surface compared to what you saw in the vicinity of the dam?

While at the dam, I briefly became fascinated with the waves on the surface of the water, as the following few pictures will show.  Here, I was thinking about how the waves might inject air bubbles up into the ice, creating small white (airy) ripples on the surface of the ice near its boundary with the flowing surface water.

I stared at the frothing water at the base of the small waterfall at the foot of the dam.  Notice how the air bubbles make the water look white, much like the ripples on the ice surface.

And here's another look at the edge of the ice surface.  Notice also the waves and ripples on the water surface.

Small waves formed as the water's flow was restricted over a submerged part of the concrete dam.

Here, water was flowing into the main stem of the creek from the right.  Again, note the ripples and waves on the surface.  The ripples and waves remained almost stationary - preferred paths, if you will - while the water passed by.

Here's a better look at some of the fringe ice.

You can probably see what happens to the small ice floes as they float into this area.  They get absorbed onto the larger sheet of ice.

The creek's not frozen solid, though, as you can see by the surface water in the middle of the photo.

It's amazing how the small ice floes follow the same path along the creek, almost forming a train!

Here you can see that there's a narrow surface channel of water that winds along the edge of the creek.

My wildlife photography is not very good.  Here, I stopped to get a photo of a few birds enjoying some seed from a feeder.  I managed to capture one, at least (what looks to be a house sparrow) before I scared it off.

This photo, and the next few, were taken at Groton Avenue Park, upstream from my backyard.

Confirmation of something I had seen from my dock a couple of days earlier.  Where branches stick into the water, small ice patches form.  Interestingly, the small ice floes floating down the creek would pass right under it, making a gurgling noise that you can hear later in the post.

Here's a small, thin patch of ice approaching the larger, tree-branch-anchored patch of ice.

And here's that same ice floe, more or less intact, after passing right under the ice patch.

Here's a photo from a little farther upstream, by the Waterwheel Cafe, where the water was moving pretty swiftly.

Finally, the above video is my first experiment in taking video with the camera.  It's a 4-second clip in which you can hear what an ice floe passing under the thicker patch of ice sounds like.

The World Turned Inside Out

I once had a strange daydream that the world, from our perspective, is really inside out.  The Earth's surface forms a boundary, but instead of being on top of it, we're really under it.  The roots of trees are really the leaves, and the leaves are really the roots. Yeah, it was a weird dream.  But it was really just a different way of looking at the world.  Sometimes we get stuck in our ways, and it can be good to break out of them, if only in our dreams.

Deer on the Creek

No photos of deer in this post.  But thanks to the ice and snow on the creek, you can see where they've been.  And yes, they walked right across the dock, probably sometime yesterday.

Even about a foot from the edge of the ice, the ice is thick enough to support the weight of the deer.  I wasn't about to try climbing onto it, though.

Meanwhile, the middle of the creek is still flowing, with small ice floes still drifting along.

I had to take one more photo of the creek, but only to capture the rare (for February) reflection of blue skies and cumulus clouds.

How Did These Rocks Get Here?

In front of my porch, I have a small planting area for flowers.  Ringing the planting area is a row of rocks, some of which may have been found in the yard, but many of which likely weren't.  Now, it's been quite a while since I learned how to identify rocks, but I know that most of the bedrock around here is composed of Devonian shale (the famous Marcellus Shale), a sedimentary rock that formed when central New York was the bed of a shallow inland sea.  But of the rocks in front of my porch, many of them look to be metamorphic, with embedded specks of darker material or ripples or waves of color, as in the rock pictured above.  One of them is a red sandstone...there's nothing like that around here.  My guess is that a previous owner of the property was something of a rock hound, collecting unique rocks from across the area.  These metamorphic rocks, and maybe even the sandstone, may be found in central New York, but they would have been transported here by glaciers...they're known as glacial erratics.  The fact that they were carried by glaciers, then likely deposited in runoff channels, explains their highly smoothed appearance.  It might be neat, once the snow clears up and I get a good look at them again, to find out exactly what kind of rocks they are and where they might have come from.

Groundwater Floods

On Monday, I attended a seminar given by a faculty member in geology from just down the road at SUNY (State University of New York) Cortland.  Cortland is a small city located about 15 minutes up the road from Freeville.  The talk was about a relatively rare type of flood that I wasn't familiar with - groundwater floods.  They happen in places where the water table can rise to the surface, and floodwaters come not overland from rainfall runoff, but from underground.  There are a couple of creeks in the Cortland area - most notably Otter Creek, which runs close to Routes 13 and 281 at one point - that are susceptible to this kind of flooding.

That the Otter Creek watershed contains water that might well to the surface is not new information.  Cortland's water supply comes from what used to be known as Otter Creek Springs, not far from the modern-day campus of SUNY Cortland.  Water from this area, long fenced off and known as the Waterworks, is pumped into the water tower, and from there into Cortland homes.  In the Waterworks, as you can see in the photo above, the stream channel is maybe 100 feet wide, and the surface water normally meanders through the stream bed.  But just downstream of the Waterworks, to the northeast, is the Broadway district.  Here, the stream has been straightened and channelized, forced into a concrete bed that runs next to a road (Broadway St) and alongside a neighborhood with a population nearly equal to that of the Village of Freeville (about 500 people).  The channelization, restricting the stream, makes this area especially vulnerable to flooding.  Too much water, and it's pouring over the roads and into people's basements.  This area has flooded twice in the last ten years, and the folks at SUNY Cortland are awaiting the next flood so they can better understand how the process works.

How does a groundwater flood work?  Well, it goes back to geology.  It requires a porous basin.  In the case of Cortland, this area was once a large outwash zone for the glaciers that covered much of the surrounding area, including Freeville.  As a result, Cortland and the surrounding area is very flat.  The course of Otter Creek doesn't have much of a gradient (or slope), once you get out of the hills that feed into it.  Also, Otter Creek is not just a surface stream.  There are a couple of points at which the stream disappears underground, and the water diffuses out into the groundwater system.  When it rains enough, the water table - the level at which the ground is saturated - rises to the surface, at least in the stream channel.  This takes some time.  In the most recent flood, it took roughly four hours for the heavy rain to be concentrated into a flood wave.  Most flash floods that are caused by runoff from the surface occur within an hour or two of the rainfall in a basin the size of Otter Creek.  The SUNY Cortland folks wonder if a pressure wave might be the cause of the groundwater floods.  Imagine squeezing a half-empty tube of toothpaste from the bottom...it takes some time for the toothpaste to become concentrated enough, as pressure builds up from behind, to surge out of the tube...but when it does, it often squirts out quickly.

Is there anything that can be done?  I believe the City of Cortland is constructing a wall in the Waterworks that would divert some of the Otter Creek floodwaters.  In the Waterworks, especially during a flood, water is added to the flow from the subsurface.  The idea is to store some of this water in the Waterworks area rather than sending it all downstream into the Broadway district.  The wall will send some of this water to the east, where it will end up in a duck pond.  With the wall diverting some of the flow, this water will be stored for up to several days, and the amount of water flowing on into the Broadway channel will be reduced.  The hope is that this alleviates the flooding immediately downstream of the Waterworks, where it tends to be worst.