4000 Olympic Swimming Pools!!!

Just before the February rain started I checked the official water level at the wharf (the gauge in on the blue pole)..

 It was just about 0 m (difficult to be precise as marine life was in the way!). Having noticed while riding into town that the water level has risen I checked it again this on 14 February and it was at 0.32 m. This gives rise to some interesting arithmetic.

My Weather Station has recorded 88mm in this event. While I would have expected rather more in the upper reaches of the catchment Bombala - not far from the end of the Genoa River - only scored 77mm (it missed out almost completely on the rain on 13 February). I will thus take my 88mm as a ball park average for the catchment.

I have been unable to find an exact value for the size of the catchment. To get a rough estimate I drew a polygon on Google Earth that includes the Mouth of the Inlet, the source of the Genoa River and the Wallagarugh Rest Area on the Princes Highway. That had a size of 285 sq km- call it 300 sq km as a round number.

Now:

> 88mm or rain over 300 sq km is about 26 million cubic metres of water

> 32 cm of water over 25 sq km (Fisheries estimate of the size of the Inlet) is about 8 million cubic metres of water.

> Without allowing for evaporation, or the fact that some of the rain is yet to hit the catchment or the shape of the waterline at differing levels this would suggest that somewhere between half and two-thirds of the rain that fell has been retained in the soil.

Obviously these figures are very rubbery but I'd suggest they show the benefits of steady rain.

On 16 February the gauge was up to 0.36m. Another million cubic metres. For any fans of News Corpse each million cubic metres is 400 Olympic swimming pools!

By 20 February the water around the lagoon at Broome St was a lot higher than it has been.

On getting round to the wharf the level was up to 0.40 metres, so the Inlet is a round 10 million cubic metres or 4000 pools.

The purpose of the Mallacoota Inlet Fisheries Reserve Management Plan (MIFRMP) is to specify the objectives, strategies and performance measures for managing fishing activities within the Mallacoota Inlet Fisheries Reserve.