Reading about River Ice Jams

From time to time I am going to take a slight diversion from the normal things that I write about here and tell you what I've been up to, even if it is not related to arial wildlland firefighting. I've been busy the last couple of days on a project that is almost completed, reading up on river ice formation. I got interested in this because of the ice jam on the Delaware in Trenton NJ last week and because I make ice observations for the National Weather Service. While these types of ice jams do not occur all that frequently in New Jersey, I wanted to do a bit of reading so that I can do a better job with my river ice observations the next time we face the risk of ice jam flooding in NJ. If any of you should be so inclined, and want to read a little more about ice jams and ice jam flooding, I'd suggest that you go to the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory Ice Jam page

and take  a look at their technical information, it is a little on the technical side, but I was able to learn something from reading some of these documents. I also came across another nice document, also from CRREL titled Introduction to River Ice Jams and Mitigation during my wonderings on the internet this afternoon.

I'll be back shortly with an update on what's been happening wildfire wise in California.