Bay Area water officials are keeping track of how much rain will be collected

As the rainy season begins, researchers are looking at how much rain will be collected.

“Like I said, I come here a few times a day with the dog,” said Tom Bunting as he pushed his way through the rain. “And I wanted to see what the river looked like.”

Bunting and his laboratory Molly took advantage of a break after the heaviest rainfall to see what effect they had on the nearby Russian River.

“It’s kind of come up. But like I said, there’s still a lot of room. We can get a lot more water here,” he noted.

Bunting said this is the kind of start he usually sees around Halloween, but he’ll accept it.

“This is perfect,” he said of the storm. “This is what we need. We could use some more of it.”

“From what I understand, if you look at Ukiah, where we’re probably expecting 10 inches of rain by the weekend, that’s a very severe storm,” explained Grant Davis, general manager of Sonoma Water. “You’re looking well above average at this time of year. So going into the year with this much precipitation in our reservoir is already committed. It’s a wonderful way to start.”

As the storm first arrives, the agency is watching to see how much of the early rainfall in this system is actually used to rehydrate the soil.

“I see it just came in this morning for both of our reservoirs, and it’s not as simple as you’re going to get saturated levels,” Davis said. “It’s about how dry the ground is now, how last summer went, when the last rain of any kind occurred.”

And as much as 10 inches of rain on this watershed would absolutely jump-start the system, which is doing well after two respectable years. Reservoirs across the state are above historical averages at the start of the year. And Sonoma’s water system benefits from changes in the way reservoirs are managed during storms like this.

“We are doing something called Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations or FIRO,” Davis said. “In Lake Mendocino, where you are now, we’ve been working for two years straight, but we’ve managed to keep a so-called pool above the normal flood limit. That’s because we’re getting better at monitoring AR. We know the general area .We know what type of integrated vapor is coming and it’s just a matter of whether it’s above or below your reservoir and how long the patterns will hold So this region has helped develop reservoir operations forecasts and now we’re sharing them knowledge throughout the state and the western states.”