New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting & Ft. Stanton Cave Conference — Abstracts

The discovery in 2007 that the Snowy River passage floods periodically and relatively frequently, has led to water flow data logger monitoring at Turtle Junction and other locations in the Snowy River passage, and an additional effort to try and understand the reasons behind the flooding. A numerical model has been developed to provide a mechanism for predicting future flooding events. This Reservoir Model uses discharge data from a USGS gage on Eagle Creek and various parameters to predict flooding events at Turtle Junction.

The model uses an EXCEL spreadsheet with inputs of the daily average discharge from USGS gage 0387600 <https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nm/nwis/uv?site_no=08387600> and a two-state output for each day: 10 indicating that water should be flowing at Turtle Junction; 0 indicating water should not be flowing at Turtle Junction. The model does not predict the status of flooding at other locations in Snowy River, or other passages in the cave.

While this is a numerical model, it can be visualized in terms of a leaky, overflowing, refillable reservoir, as shown in the diagram below.

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