The Lake, Right Now
Four gauges and a buoy
Surface elevation in feet above the 1929 datum, water temperature, and wind where the gauge reports it. Readings are nominally every fifteen minutes; the age of each is on the card, and a card whose reading is more than three hours old is marked stale.
The tilt between the gauges right now
The four gauges run a hundred and twenty miles (190 km) from Whitehall to Rouses Point, and they almost never read the same. The difference between the ends is the lake tilted in its basin — wind pushing water downwind, and the whole body then sloshing back. The seiche page is about that motion; this is its current value.
The tilt outlook
Wind pushes the lake downhill and the lake takes most of a day to respond, which is what makes the tilt predictable at all from a wind forecast. This is the wind-driven part on its own — the slower movement, which is runoff rather than weather, is not forecast here.
Water temperature by depth at the Valcour buoy
The Valcour buoy reports a temperature every meter or two, from the surface to the bottom of its string. In summer the top few meters are far warmer than the water below the thermocline.
The thermocline outlook
Wind blowing along the lake tilts the whole warm layer, and at this end of it the boundary can move several meters in a day.
Notes
- Everything on this page is fetched live from someone else's server when it loads. If a feed is slow, blocked by your network, or simply down, the panel that needs it reports the failure and prints no reading where the number would be.
- Gauge elevations are feet above the NGVD 1929 datum, which is what USGS publishes for this lake. They are provisional readings, subject to revision, and not survey-grade.
- The two outlooks are not live the way the gauges are. They come from a model fitted on each data run and are as current as the last build; the date is at the foot of the page.
Live: USGS National Water Information System (instantaneous values); Lake Champlain Research Institute, SUNY Plattsburgh (Valcour buoy). Outlooks: pipeline/forecast.py, scored against a skill threshold written down before it had data.