In my previous post, about California water levels, I presented a “bar graph” showing the amount of water currently in California’s reservoirs. However, I thought it’d be interesting to see how this has changed over the course of the last few months, since the state has gotten alot of rain and snow recently. I decided to try and “animate” the graph for the current water year (going back to October 1, 2015) showing how the recent El Nino rain has been filling up the reservoirs in California. Click the “animate” button below the figure and you can use the slider to change the speed of animation as it cycles through the days.



You can really see a few interesting things:

how low the water level is in December

the start of the rains in January, which start to raise the water level

the March precipitation which makes the storage level rise very quickly

Notes: This graph is updated daily and is made in javascript from data gathered from the California Department of Water Resources website.