This week, I had continued working on the metadata for the Willis S. Jones papers. Several of them consisted of water flow measurements and discharge measurements from the Temecula Creek, the Harrison Canyon and dams. The measurements corresponding to the dams had insuffuicient information compared to the measurements on the canyon and the creek. What was surprising was that, in the same week I read news about a rare L.A. storm, termed as the ‘Megastorm’ or ‘Arkstorm’ by experts, which could possibly occur and if it does, would severely damage the Whittier Narrows Dam causing massive flooding. This in turn could affect several cities such as Long Beach, Lakewood, Montebello and so on.
Many weather scientists claim that the reports generated so far under-estimate its effects. That is when I started to understand how important preservation of weather reports are as it could be used later for generating averages and estimates that would aid in determining catastrophic events.