Tahoe: Becoming Clearer

Visibility (the Secchi depth) is decreasing (UC Davis)

The waters of Lake Tahoe are renowned for their clarity, but in recent decades murkiness has risen.

The "Secchi disk" is a measurement tool that has been used for over half a century:

The white frisbee is the most well-known and influential method of studying Lake Tahoe’s clarity. Called the Secchi disk, it has been used by UC Davis scientists to measure Lake Tahoe’s clarity since 1968. The method is simple: Scientists lower a 10-inch disk into the water, lean over the edge of the boat and mark the moment when it disappears into the blue and they can no longer see it. There are other ways to measure how far light penetrates into a lake and how clear the water is, Hampton said. However, the Secchi disk’s simplicity makes it universally understood and resonate with people in a meaningful way, and researchers use the Secchi disk to study clarity in lakes all over the world.

Despite the cloudy long-term trend, UC Davis researchers say that the lake has become clearer beginning three years ago: [bold added]

For the last five months of 2022, Lake Tahoe was the clearest it has been since the 1980s. That is due in part to a resurgence of the lake’s native zooplankton. They’ve provided a natural clean-up crew to help restore the lake’s famous blue waters.

The findings are reported in the “Lake Tahoe Clarity Report 2022,” released today from the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, or TERC, for the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency...

The primary factors affecting lake clarity are the concentration of particles in a specific size range, such as silt and clay, and tiny phytoplankton, or algae. The phytoplankton Cyclotella, a single-celled alga, is in this size range and has impacted clarity in most years.

Zooplankton are small, microscopic animals. Some zooplankton, particularly Daphnia and Bosmina, are specialized to consume particles in that critical size range.

“Daphnia and Bosmina largely disappeared from the lake after they were grazed down following the introduction of the Mysis shrimp in the 1960s,” said Geoffrey Schladow, director of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center. “In late 2021, the Mysis population unexpectedly crashed, and it took 12 months for the Daphnia and Bosmina to build up their numbers and start their natural cleansing.”

Other factors are known to influence year-to-year changes in clarity. These include the magnitude of the runoff, the warming of the lake surface and the depth to which the lake mixes in the previous winter. The report examined all these factors and concluded that only the change in the zooplankton community could account for the magnitude of this year’s change.

It was too lazy to attribute the trend toward lower water clarity to the usual suspects of runoff, pollution, wildfires, and global warming. The growth in Mysis shrimp may have been the reason because of the negative impact on zooplankton, while the 2021 "crash" in Mysis shrimp resulted in a resurgence in plankton that "cleansed" Lake Tahoe. The 2021 shrimp die-off is so far unexplained and needs to be researched for a satisfactory understanding of the Tahoe ecosystem.

What was once clear is now cloudy, buty your humble blogger is confident that it shall become clear again.

Wet Weather: Dampening the Scoldings

December snow in Tahoe, which is under flood watch

We're ending the year with a series of storms.

Headline: Entire Bay Area under flood watch this weekend as more storms roll in

A flood watch will be in effect for the Bay Area from Friday evening to Saturday evening as more rain arrives in the region, according to the National Weather Service.

Moderate to heavy rain is expected during that time frame, and it could be more than already saturated soils can absorb.

Rapid rises of rivers, streams and creeks are expected, the National Weather Service said, and urban areas and roadways with poor drainage may see flooding...

A brief reprieve is expected on New Year’s Day before more rain moves in, the National Weather Service said.

I'm sure the nattering nabobs of global warmism will insist one rainy season doesn't make up for years of dryness and that we should continue to conserve water, but I'm taking this year by year.

Let's be thankful that there won't be mandated cutbacks and usage penalties next summer and even more thankful that the drought/climate alarmists will dampen, somewhat, the volume of their scoldings.

I Went to a Fight Tahoe the Other Night and a Hockey Game Broke Out

Vegas and Colorado practiced on Saturday (Guardian photo)

Making Lemonade Dept:
The pandemic has afforded a unique opportunity for the National Hockey League to stage outdoor hockey games in venues that could not accommodate thousands of fans. This weekend the NHL scheduled two games at Lake Tahoe.

The Edgewood Tahoe Resort will become its own bubble. Only those credentialed will be permitted through the gates.

Everyone will be tested and adhere to strict protocols. Teams and staff members will not be permitted to leave the grounds during their stay...

The NHL will build everything needed for an NHL game but, by design, little else. It will create locker rooms that feel like wooden cabins; the players will shower at the hotel. The scoreboard will be retro.

While most of us want to go back to the way things were just before COVID-19, the coronavirus has reminded us that the back-to-basics life can be beautiful.

Helping Those Who Are Left Behind

Keith Cormican, South Lake Tahoe (Chron photo)

It's not your usual feel-good story because it's got grief, uncertainty, and death.

Keith Cormican recovers the bodies of drowning victims that law enforcement and other agencies cannot find and brings "solace for anguished families, and sometimes more."(In California, without a body, a person cannot be declared dead for five years, and some families face financial ruin without the life insurance proceeds.)

A stout Midwesterner with a round face, gray mustache and glacier blue eyes, Cormican is not part of a government agency — no badge, no uniform. The 61-year-old makes a living running a scuba diving shop in Wisconsin.

But he has devoted much of the past 25 years to his macabre avocation, towing his custom-outfitted search boat around the country and spending long days motoring across lakes in pursuit of those no one can find. Since 2013 he has investigated more than 125 cases and located 32 bodies. He has searched for victims of murder and suicide, but most often for people who died in accidental drownings, which occur on popular lakes like Tahoe every year.

Keith Cormican is expert at what he does and only charges for his expenses. (He earns fees for training others.) Grateful for his help, survivors can contribute to Bruce's Legacy, named after Keith's older brother, a fire fighter who himself died while trying to recover a drowning victim.

When the time comes for him to stand before the Pearly Gates and account for his life, Keith Cormican won't stumble for an answer like most of us. He'll go right in.

San Francisco Has Topped Out

This month I've been posting--and probably boring you to tears, dear reader--about the untenability of life in the Bay Area ("Cascading Catastrophes", "Thousands Flee"). Chronicle writers have devoted time to this theme:

Bad things keep piling on — when is enough enough in the Bay Area? [bold added]

Come for the fog, stay with the smoke (Chron)

The lightning-sparked fires spreading in all directions, fouling the region’s air and driving people from their homes in at least six of our nine counties, are the latest onslaught in a year that already has given us too many layers of stress. They come as we enter our sixth month of a pandemic that has no clear end, as protests continue against the racial inequities made stark by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May...

In a poll last year by the Bay Area Council, for example, 57% of the people surveyed by the business group said that the region was on the “wrong track” — twice the number who held that view in 2015. Almost as many, 49%, classified themselves as “strongly” or “somewhat” likely to move from the region in the next few years. Asked why, nearly three-quarters identified housing costs or the cost of living as the main culprit.

Veteran writer Carl Nolte believes San Francisco will bounce back:

Forces keep battering San Francisco — and its spirit is still alive

2003: now this is fog.

There are a lot of examples of how the city has lost its soul: the tent encampments, the boarded-up stores, the urban failures you see everyday, the moving vans taking people away for good.

But I see other things: the man up the street who left some honey from local bees on my doorstep earlier in the summer, the woman who left a nosegay of flowers from her garden by her gate with an invitation to passersby to take the flowers home. The sidewalk libraries with free books. A city’s soul is intangible, wispy and ephemeral like the summer fog. You miss it most when the heat’s on.

Meanwhile, home prices are booming in a resort town:

Downtown Truckee, 12 mi from N Tahoe (Chron)

Tahoe’s new Gold Rush: Bay Area residents fleeing coronavirus push up home prices

The COVID-19 pandemic has stoked a real estate boom throughout the Tahoe region, propelled by thousands of workers fleeing San Francisco and the broader Bay Area. Freed from the shackles of 9-to-5 office work, these white-collar workers are seeking mountain homes near open space and tranquility far from downtown high-rises. And they have the money to pay for it.

Young people move here for the nightlife, job opportunities, networking, and the weather. The nightlife is non-existent, jobs and networking can be done remotely, and the smokey air, not fog, is now an annual summer phenomenon.

The population inflow is slowing, the outflow is accelerating, and, sorry Carl Nolte, IMHO I don't see what will stop these trends.