Backcountry Water Oracle
33.80449, -110.92928

Trailside Spring

33.80449, -110.92928

Long unreportedlast reported 8 years ago

How this site decides what it can and cannot say — the method.

Insufficient record

No read issued

1 report — a correlation needs at least 10 before it means anything, so no read is issued here.

What people saw

One observation, 8 years ago: dry on 2018-06-30.

These are the observations themselves, not a forecast. Too few to correlate against rainfall, but they are what people actually found.

  • 2018-06-30Dry0.0Dry at trail, did not attempt the ridiculous bushwhack to check exact coordinates.

Why

The engine will still produce a number from 1 report, and that number is noise. It will happily report a perfect correlation from two observations. On a screen where someone is deciding how much water to carry, that is the most dangerous thing this site could render, so it is not rendered.

With 1 report, the engine's read would average all 1 of them rather than the ones whose rainfall matched today — so it would return the same figure on every date of the year, whatever the weather had done. It is a summary of the record, not a forecast.

9 more reports would reach the 10 needed for a read.

Rainfall here

The last 60 days here have been much wetter than usual for mid September — 95th percentile against 19 years of rainfall at this coordinate, through 2026-09-15.

This is rainfall, not water. It says what the weather has done here, not what is in the ground — a spring fed from deep water can run through a dry autumn, and a runoff channel can be empty two weeks after a wet one. Which of those this is takes reports to find out.

7.96 over 60 days, against 19 years at this coordinate. Band: much wetter.

This is the fix

Every dated observation moves this source closer to a read, and sharpens the ones around it too.

Add a report

What was the water doing when you were there? Every observation sharpens this source and, because nearby sources lend each other statistical strength, the ones around it.

The day you were standing there, not today. The forecast correlates rainfall up to this date, so a wrong date is worse than no report.

How much water?

Score the water you could actually use. If the seep itself has stopped but the rock tanks below it are holding, that is water — score the tanks.

In your own words. Kept verbatim — the number is what the model reads, but this is what a human checks when a forecast looks surprising.