Kelsie French and I resumed our water quality monitoring efforts for 2024 on Sunday May 5th, a little earlier than in recent years. The lake is still largely homogenous with a surface temperature of 13.3°C (55.9°F) and 11.2°C at 8 meters. Surface DO was 11.3 mg/L and 8.4 mg/L at 8 meters. The Secchi disk reading was 3.55 meters (11.6 feet) which I guess is about normal for this time of year, but nothing to write home about. You can see where it lands on the chart at left (the sole data point, far to the right, in the 2024 column right below the red trendline). You can see a subset of water quality data including transparency going back to 2001 on our Clary Lake Water Quality Monitoring Data page. Today the water was kind of murky. Despite being early in the season, there’s already phytoplankton, primarily diatoms, populating the lake. As the water warms up, the diatoms will mostly die off to be replaced by green and blue-green algae later in the season. It’s really the blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria) that we’re worried about. Blue-green algae is mostly a late summer and fall phenomena. Continue reading →

I have archived the April 2024 water level chart (above, and at left). April was another wet month, though not nearly as wet as March had been: we received 4.62 inches of rain, 3/4 of an inch more than the 3.87 inches we’ve received in a “normal” year, whatever that means. Most of that rain fell by the 12th of the month, only a little over a half inch fell during the rest of the month. This allowed the ground was to dry out a bit. For the year we’re at 20.58 inches of precipitation, a little more than 7 inches above average for this date. This bodes well for ground water supplies later this summer. All this water has kept the lake level generally higher than we like: March actually ended with the lake level 0.31 feet above the High Water Mark or fully 6 inches ABOVE the lowest spot on the top of the dam. When the lake is that high, there is a real risk of shoreline erosion in areas around the lake that are not protected by a rocky shoreline. However, managing the dam to maintain a specific lake level is a real challenge and the response to a change in gate opening or weir height can be maddeningly slow. It’s too easy to over shoot the mark, or fall short of it. Therefore, we try to avoid large gate and weir adjustments and take some time to bring the lake level up or down where we want it. Continue reading →

March 2024

I have archived the March 2024 water level chart (above, and at left). The dearth of precipitation we saw in February did not continue into March. On the contrary, we ended up with 10.72 inches of precipitation making March 2024 the second wettest March on record, only slightly behind the 11.24 inches received in March 2010. “Normal” March precipitation in this area is around 3.77 inches but we received more than 2.8 times more than that. Even with the lack of rainfall we saw in February, we end the month with nearly 7 inches more annual precipitation than is normal for this date. March was also warmer and windier than usual which resulted in Clary’s ice cover melting off on March 8th, the earliest we’ve recorded since record keeping started in 2001. Continue reading →

February 2024

I have archived the February 2024 water level chart (above, and at left). There was virtually no precipitation to speak of in February until the last 2 days of the month when we received a total of 1.16″ of rain! We ended the month with only 1.35 inches total, or only 52% of the normal 2.61 inches. On average, February has the least amount of precipitation of all 12 months. Despite the lack of precipitation, the lake level actually fell quite slowly over the course of the month losing only 0.36 feet all month while outflows remained quite high, thanks to January’s excessive rainfall. In fact, for much of the month of February total outflows in acre-feet exceeded those in 2023 which is amazing considering how little precipitation we received. By the end of the 3rd week of February however, outflows had fallen behind 2023 numbers and the lake level finally reached -1.5 feet. With slowing outflows, we decided it was time to add some stoplogs to the weir. The rainfall at the end of the month brought the lake up 4 tenths of a foot, ending the month at -1.09 feet or about average for the end of February. I expect the lake will rise a little more in the  next couple of days. Continue reading →

January 2024

I have archived the January 2024 water level chart (above, and at left). With an average monthly precipitation of 3.19 inches, January is normally the least wettest month next to February which averages only 2.61 inches of precipitation, usually in the form of snow. This year however we received 3.82 inches or water or 120% of our normal precipitation on top of the whopping 16″ of surplus rainfall we received in 2023. We had to release a lot of water in January from surface runoff from rain and snow melt and also from ground water to keep the lake level down where it belongs this time of year.  We still had water overtopping the dam when the lake rose to within a tenth of a foot of the high water mark on January 14th, an unusual circumstance in January. Continue reading →