[Geysers] winter update

[Bell, Catherine]

Greetings from Old Faithful!

After two very cold mornings (-32F at OF yesterday, -47 at West
Yellowstone), it has now warmed up to a balmy 16F.  It's snowing prettily,
with a couple of inches of lovely fluffy stuff so far.  We continue under a
winter weather advisory through 5:00 am on Sunday.

GIANTESS
The big news since I last wrote, of course, is last week's Giantess
eruption.  As you know, it was spotted by Ranger Landis Ehler on Wednesday,
January 29 at 1455ie.  All of us on staff at the visitor center were able
to get over to see it that afternoon, despite a howling snowstorm that
impaired visibility even from the closest points on the Geyser Hill
boardwalk.  Unfortunately, the weather and darkness drove us inside before
the initial Vault eruption.

I had geyser predict the following morning and was able to ski past
Giantess on my return.  I was lucky to arrive at the right moment to see
some nice big splashes.  I'd estimate the height as ranging from 30 feet
all the way up to 100 feet on a few especially impressive bursts.  I took a
short, poor-quality video that you can view at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b67WvFDQ5No.  None of my still pictures show
much of anything, due to the lack of contrast: white water, white steam,
white snow, white sky.

By Friday morning, we no longer observed any activity.  Visitor reports of
a few splashes in the early morning make us suspect an approximate duration
of 40 hours.  I have no information on how long the crater took to refill.

CASTLE
Castle was erupting this morning ( Feb. 7, 0905ie MJR) when Ranger Annie
Carlson went out there on geyser predict, so no electronic times today,
which is too bad: Castle has been up to some interesting stuff over the
past few days. Minor-major-minor-minor, at the very least.  We initially
reported this as four minors in a row, but reviewing the data makes us feel
confident that the eruption of Feb. 5 at 0312 was a major after all.  We
have corrected our data on geysertimes.org.  Here's a screenshot of
yesterday's Castle download:
[image: Inline image 1]

GRAND
We had some problems with the Grand logger that kept us from getting
electronic times for several days.  The logger has now been replaced and
the new one is functioning nicely.  We're going to be shortening our
prediction interval for Grand from the current 7 hrs 30 min to 7 hours.

LOWER GEYSER BASIN
Guides have reported Fountain times to us on 11 days since Jan. 20.  These
reports are of course limited to when they happen to be passing through, so
we have no closed intervals.

That's about all I have for now.  If you have any specific questions about
what's going on in the geyser basin, please don't hesitate to ask!

Enjoying winter,
Cathy

--
Cathy Bell
Park Ranger
Old Faithful Visitor Education Center
Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190
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