Sunrise light on a grove of tufa towers emerging from the water of Mono Lake with soft green and dusty-red wild grasses in the foreground, Canada geese in the shallow water with reflections of the rocky towers, and desert hills in the distance.

New resources added to Mono Basin Clearinghouse

Sunrise light on a grove of tufa towers emerging from the water of Mono Lake with soft green and dusty-red wild grasses in the foreground, Canada geese in the shallow water with reflections of the rocky towers, and desert hills in the distance.

The Mono Basin Clearinghouse has had some major upgrades and updates recently! The most important one is that it and our other sites—monolake.org, leevining.com, birdchautauqua.org—are all back online as of 9:00am this morning after almost 24 hours of downtime due to network problems at the data center where our server is hosted.

The other structural upgrade is that the Clearinghouse is now a PHP-powered site! You’ll notice the ending of most of the page names has changed from .htm to .php. This allows us to more efficiently update the site. We have left forwarding pages at many (but not all) of the former pages, so if you can’t find something, try changing the .htm to .php and see if you get it. Our links from monolake.org will be updated as time permits.

Now for the fun stuff! What is new on the site:

  • The biggest change repeat users will notice is a new Google search. We used Google’s University Search starting in 2001, and that became Public Service Search in 2004, and it was just discontinued in February. We are now using Google’s Custom Search Engine, which is better in some ways and less flexible in others. We will continue to optimize this as we learn how best to implement its many features.
  • Legal resources: All three active FERC licenses in the Mono Basin, the 1914 Mill Creek Water Rights Decree, and new articles on the public trust and Fish & Game Code Section 5937.
  • Current research: An economic study that contains Mono County angling statistics.
  • Raw data: Our companion frames page to DWP’s real-time hydrology data page is updated with the forecasted runoff for this year and explanations relevant to the 2014 runoff year.

The Mono Basin Clearinghouse hasn’t been updated frequently during the past three years. Now that our CAMMP process is over, I anticipate time for more frequent updates, and the posting of some great documents that have turned up as a result of that process. An upcoming update to look forward to this summer: All 17 auxiliary reports to the 1993 Mono Basin EIR. For updates on new Clearinghouse content, check here.