Hydrology

• STAMFORD, Conn., Dec. 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- BlueTriton Brands applauds the Environmental Protection Agency for its announcement to require water utilities to replace lead pipes across the country and impose stricter limits on lead in drinking water.
• "Water is a resource we all rely on for good health, and everyone should have access to safe drinking water.
• Since 2018, BlueTriton provided a reliable source of safe drinking water for the people of Flint, Michigan, who experienced a public health crisis because of contaminated drinking water.
• BlueTriton carefully monitors water quality for its brands, which have been delivering healthy hydration for more than 100 years.

• Weather Tools, Inc. unveils the 2023-24 California Annual Precipitation (CAP) report today, emphasizing that water year precipitation is influenced by factors beyond El Niño alone.
• No other California water year precipitation forecast has come close to doing the same, making it the most accurate and reliable water year precipitation forecast in California.
• While strong El Niño conditions are expected to persist into the spring of 2024, past El Niño events have shown significant variation in their impact on California precipitation.
• In addition to the water year precipitation forecast, customers receive monthly progress reports with information on how the water year is unfolding.

• "The leadership team at Bering Straits Native Corporation (BSNC) is pleased with the early returns from Graphite One's busy drilling season.
• "As a BSNC shareholder originally from Nome myself, I am thrilled by what this project can do for our region."
• With the United States currently 100 per cent import dependent for natural graphite, Graphite One is planning to develop a complete U.S.-based, advanced graphite supply chain solution anchored by the Graphite Creek resource.
• Rob Retherford, P. Geo, with Alaska Earth Sciences, Inc. provided oversite to the 2023 drilling and sampling program.

• For more than six months a year, Quebec’s boreal forest is covered in a thick blanket of snow.
• The major floods of spring 2023 in the Charlevoix region show why the snow cover poses a risk.
• Last winter, the Rivière du Gouffre watershed, of which nearly 75 per cent is covered by forests, accumulated a large amount of snow.

Rain as an energy carrier

• As we saw in the spring of 2023, rain events combined with snow cover can lead to a sudden rise in river water levels.
• A heat exchange occurs between rain and snow when their temperatures differ.
• Once the snow has reached a temperature of 0°C, any additional heat from the rain causes melting.

The snow cover, a complexly structured environment

• Rather, it is a stack of snow layers that represent the history of the winter’s meteorological events.
• Rainwater must percolate through all the snow layers to reach the ground, and eventually, the watercourse.

The role of the forest

• By intercepting part of the precipitation in its solid form (snow), trees limit the accumulation of snow on the ground.
• In addition, the discharge of snow intercepted by trees in solid or liquid form increases the heterogeneity of the snow cover.

The same everywhere?

• It’s more akin to sparse vegetation with treeless zones known as gaps.
• In these gaps, the structure of the snow cover is very different from that under the trees.
• The greater accumulation of snow in the gaps favours the compaction of snow layers and the formation of fine grains.

Snow melts faster in gaps

• Although more snow would accumulate in the gaps, it takes less time to melt and reaches the watercourse more quickly than the snow under the trees.
• The combination of thicker snow cover in the gaps and more permeable snow layers under the trees contributed to the Rivière du Gouffre flooding Baie-Saint-Paul during the extreme rainfall of spring 2023.
• However, increased knowledge of the interactions between snow cover and forest will help improve hydrological models and ensure better public protection against flooding.