When the 2024 water year ended Sept. 30, it had information to share with the residents of the Lake Almanor area and all of Plumas County. Phil Datner, a retired electronic technician, has made the hydrological data available in a visual format: a graph.
Each multicolored line represents a year from 2015 to 2024. They document that 2024 was, for the second year in a row, a wetter year than the recent average. The black dotted line represents the average for the decade.
Almanor stayed above the 10-year average from October through September, the hydrological year. The lake volume started the year at 931,000 acre-feet and ended at 921,000 acre-feet, said Datner, a resident of Hamilton Branch who has been paying attention to Lake Almanor’s ebb and flow since 2015.
During the recent water year, the lowest volume was 891,350 acre-feet, which hit 4,484.3 feet in elevation on Jan. 12. The highest lake volume was 1,124,586 acre-feet on June 3, at an elevation of 4,493.32 feet.
The previous year, water year 2023, the lake started in October at 695,000 acre-feet and ended at 935,000 acre-feet. The lower level at the start of the water year reflected several years of drought, Datner said.
His annual water year graphs of Lake Almanor use raw data from the California Data Exchange Center, managed by the Department of Water Resources.
Information provided by Phil Datner