Here comes the water...

Flooding is beginning in earnest now, and conditions are worsening. 

It's Tuesday morning and it's raining hard in the Twin Cities, and dumping snow further north.  The Mississippi is rising fast in St. Paul:  it was at 8.5 feet this morning and is expected to hit 13.4 feet--a five-foot rise--by Thursday morning.  And that's not taking into account any rain/snow after 7 a.m. today.  It takes serious water to make a river as big as the Mississippi rise five feet in two days, and current precipitation means this forecast is low and will be revised upward very soon.

Streets near the river are closing and the Upper Landing housing project--which should never have been allowed in the first place--is getting ready to evacuate.  Long-range flood forecasts are already out of date and will need to be revised, but even the current projection suggests a 40 percent chance of exceeding the record flood crest of 26.4 feet on April 16, 1965.

It's worth noting that the record flood levels are all from mid-April.  The northern part of the Mississippi and St. Croix watersheds still contain lots of old snow, and new snow is piling up quickly.

On the St. Croix, the much-discussed Stillwater bridge will likely close on Saturday, if not sooner.  The river there stood at 679.15 this morning (Tuesday), and will rise to 686--the level needed to close the bridge--by late Saturday (and that's assuming we don't get all the precipitation we're now getting).

The flood of record on the St. Croix at Stillwater is 694.1, reached on April 18, 1965.  The chance of exceeding that currently stands at 20 percent.

Now that our snowpack is melting in earnest, flood forecasting will become a rapidly changing game.  But with a significant precipitation event ongoing and another coming over the weekend, the odds of this being a major flood event are rising faster than the river.