Minnesota Steelheader

Good News- The money from the Clean Water portion of the Legacy act must be flowing (ugh, another bad pun...) I was attempting to clean up a program I wrote to extrapolate flows for the various NS tribs and it blew up on me yesterday. After I got done crying (I lost almost 10 years worth of grinding, dull work), I started recapturing data. I went to the MPCA/DNR archives for some Sucker River data and lo and behold, the sonde was once again transmitting real-time data. This will be yet another very useful tool for Minnesota Steelheaders. The new sonde displays discharge as well as rainfall amounts, just use your pointer. If you hover over the green spikes at the top it will tell you how much rain they got. So I guess it was one of those serendipitous things. I wouldn't have gone to the archives until early next year sometime and wouldn't have noticed the new live data until then. I already had some tools developed for the old Sucker station, so it won't take very long to de...

Greetings Minnesota Steelheaders- I finally had the (delayed) opportunity to run some numbers from the 2009 Lower North Shore Spring Run and there are a few items of note. One important item illustrated here is the strong temperature-return correlation for Steelhead as well as Kamloops. While fish were undoubtedly in the streams as soon as they opened up (I saw a number of them in early April when there was still ice), once again we see that average stream temperatures which hit 40 degrees play a strong role in the start of upstream migrations of North Shore fish. You can use this information to your advantage when trying to locate active fish early in the run no matter what part of the North Shore you prefer. The following are plots of 2008-2009 Knife River Steelhead captures by date against both temperature and flow: ( Click images for larger version) Note that while the temperatures listed are for a couple different streams (real-time data is hard to come by), the overall temps were...