Minnesota Steelheader

As of 03.30.2012 Regards-

Man, I don't know about you but I am flummoxed... Since last year started really early and this year it's even warmer, I started looking for all the pre-run indicators I wouldn't normally even look for until March at the earliest. Much to my surprise, a couple cropped up right away. First, we're already seeing some significant brown-up in the St. Louis River estuary as well as along the lower shore. This isn't necessarily good because we need the snowmelt to feed flow for the runs; and snow is exactly what we have very little of. Lets hope for lots of precip, snow or other wise soon. The North Shore drought continues... Secondly the gauge signature for the Knife is showing signs of ice pack movement we don't normally see until just a short time before the run. It almost looks as if the ice is in the very early stages of breaking up based on the signature. This would be crazy early if it's actually happening. Now, I'm not predicting an early run by any me...

Aack! I get so wrapped up in the data sometimes I forget that perhaps I should explain where I'm getting information from. No wonder people often look at me like I have lobsters crawling out of my ears... I received a couple e-mails regarding temperature information I've posted wondering how to get the information themselves. I'll show you a couple ways to get the maximum information out of the hydrographs. Prepare for steelhead information overload! (O.k., I'm exaggerating a bit) If you open up one of the DNR/MPCA cooperative hydrographs like the Poplar , it looks like this (Click for Larger Image): The line represents flow in cubic feet per second. 1cfs = about 7.5 gallons per second. Flow goes up, line goes up etc. If you want to see the temps however, just click on the, "data for above period (csv)" link at the bottom of the page there. This will open a csv file (comma separated value - o.k., THAT's overload!) in a spreadsheet format & the temps w...

The Poplar River Sonde is a great resource for figuring out what's happening on the Upper North Shore. You can use it like an index station as it tends to track fairly closely with regards to temperature on streams like the Arrowhead Brule, Kadunce, Devil Track & Cascade Rivers. The Upper North Shore looks to be having just as early a run as the rest of the North Shore rather than the 1-3 week lag of the Lower North Shore. Here are the latest low, average & high temperatures as of 04.09.2010 (Click Image for Larger Version):