Great Lakes Water Levels Dropping
December 13th, 2010 at 4:00 am by Bill Steffen under Bill's Blog, Weather
<–Grand Haven picture by Mike Slootmaker. The water levels of the Great Lakes have been dropping. Lake Michigan has seen the biggest drop, down 4 inches in the past month and 14 inches in the past year. Since each inch of water on Lake Michigan represents 390 billion gallons of water, that means a loss of 5.46 TRILLION (sounds like a stimulus package or a Wall St. bailout, or how many years until the Lions win a Super Bowl) gallons of water! This is a combination of higher than average evaporation rates and lower than average precipitation. Lake Michigan is now 18″ below the long-term average. Lake Superior is down 8 inches in the past year. Lake Huron is the same as Lake Michigan (they behave like one lake, connected at the Mac. Bridge). Lake Erie has lost 4 inches. Lake Ontario is the exception. They are up 2 inches in the past year and are right on their long-term average.
Sounds like we need it to freeze over for the season… Ice fishing galore!!!! Hahahaha
That is good news for people with metal detectors.
Low water makes it easier to find long lost diamond rings.
The lake gives one up every now and then.
Our kayaking group went down the lower Rogue River – and it was VERY low, judging by how many times I hit rocks/gravel….LOL! But we encountered many fishermen who were in ankle-deep water – so I guess it WAS shallow. I can never tell water levels from Gun Lake since it’s spring-fed and water level regulated by the Gun River dam.
Rogue River water levels are usually more correlated with rain/runoff than anything else. Not sure if Lake Michigan has much of an effect.
Sorry I wasn’t clearer – I meant the lack of rain was affecting the local lakes and streams, also….
I saw a documentary a week ago identifying Nestle Co in Stanton MI (makers of Iron Mountain bottled water) who are pumping approximately 96 million gallons of water per year from our rivers and lakes. This was as a result of an agreement between them and former Governor John Engler in 2000. According to the documentary, the state is receiving a whopping sum of $100 per year for their trouble. Maybe the powers to be could start their investigation in Stanton. I know I would.
96 million gallons a year is a drop in the bucket. The loss of water from Lake Michigan in the last year is 5.5 TRILLION gallons. Precipitation and evaporation are the overwhelming factors.
Million and trillion are practically the same thing. Aren’t they???
LOL…
Only if you’re a politician talking money. A trillion is a million millions.
Nestle is not in Stanton Michigan……no need to drag that town down anymore than it is
Nestle is in Stanwood, just south of Big Rapids.
Nestle sells only spring water, and they have 3 sources for the water they sell, their own facility just south of Stanwood, and they also buy spring water from the towns of Evart and Rodney, Michigan. Compare the 95 million gallons of water per year pumped by Nestle from springs to the 40 million gallons per day the city of Grand Rapids pumps out of Lake Michigan directly. The city of Grand Rapids pumps twice the amount of water per day as Nestle pumps out in an entire year.
I don’t want to be crude, but almost all that water from both sources ends up right back in the Great Lakes, it isn’t gone forever. When people drink water, it only stays in their bodies for a short time, then it re-enters the system again.
Some of the water that Nestle bottles ends up outside the Great Lakes basin, most of that goes to parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota and it ends up in the Mississippi River, which is connected to the Great Lakes by the shipping canal in Chicago that every one is worried will be the pathway the asian carp will use to invade the Great Lakes. An even smaller amout is shipped completely out of the Great Lakes Basin, but on the other hand, you have sources of water from food items such as soup, for example, coming to Michigan from outside the Great Lakes Basin.
The amount of water “lost” as a result of the Nestle operation is so small as to be meaningless as far as the Great Lakes levels are concerned.
I am sure this is a result of the very hot summer we had with very little rainfall. I wonder how much the lake will be impacted by all the lake effect snow that we are getting?
It’s water coming out of the lake that will melt and (most of it) will go back into the lake…there’s actually a net loss of water from the lake because of lake-effect snow.
i hope the lake dry’s up so we can stop the lake effect! when does the lake effect usually stop? Mid January?
Holy cow! If Lake Michigan goes dry (and all the other connecting lakes) – we’ve got WAY bigger problems than “lake effect”!!!!!
I’m hoping you meant “when the lake freezes over” because that would stop the lake effect. It doesn’t happen very often, though…..
it may freeze over this winter.
So when are we going to put in a weir at the mouth of the Saint Clair river? This is something done in many other similar situations (http://www.lakelevels.org/). And its cost would be much lower then the monies used to dredge so many shipping ports. It would also raise the lake back up in the long run.
Also to the gentleman talking about Nestle, I also am not a fan of bottled water due the the waste and pollution caused by all the plastic drinking bottles. And I feel that its just laziness that you can’t fill up a bottle of water before you go out somewhere (I grew up without bottled water). Thirdly, its no different then throwing a filter on your tap (which I do). But I wouldn’t get too hung up on one company taking 96,000,000 gal of water a year when the loss talked about here is 5,460,000,000,000 or .00176%. Its important, but not in its self a cause for concern in this context. If all of us in the Great Lakes area followed the lesson of Florida, “If it;s brown flush it down. If it’s yellow let it mellow” I’m sure (no statics here though) it would save more than any one company takes.
R,R,R, REDUCE, REuse, recycle. In that order.
That’s my 2 cents.
Cheers,
Jayson
That is true about reuse, but most of the sewage in the area is treated and sent down some river here in Michigan into the Great Lakes. Michigan sits in a giant rock bowl that is tilted a little. So if that bowl isn’t being filled with rain water than sorry the levels are going to go down. Wasn’t not so many years ago that the levels were above average?
James
How quickly you’ve forgotten about the end of the world high water levels in the 1980s and 1990′s…
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/now/wlevels/lowlevels/plot/Michigan-Huron.gif
Interesting…I grew up at the mouth of the St. Clair River.
Watch Conspiracy Theory on global warming. This may help explain what’s happening to our Great Lakes.
Bill, sorry, I may have sent an unfinished email prematurely.
Does Lake Michigan’s level rise temporarily near the south end (I live north of Holland)during periods of high north winds as we have had for the last two days? We have experienced considerable beach erosion, so I wonder if a temporary increase in the water level is a factor. Of course the north wind also causes a strong current running parallel to the shoreline, taking sand with it. Is there a resource that monitors water level in this area on a daily basis?
Thanks,
Paul Winter
The water in the great lakes does slosh back and forth some during high winds (think bath tub). I know during the big wind storm back in October that the levels dropped noticably on the west side of the lake and rose on the east side. If I remember right, Bill or one of the bloggers posted a link to the lake water level that was interesting.
The effect is called a “seiche” and Bill posted about it (going the other way) in October: http:
//blogs.woodtv.com/2010/10/28/standing-seiche-on-lake-michigan/
Data for Holland: http://glakesonline.nos.noaa.gov/plotcomp.shtml?station_info=9087031+Holland,+MI+&flag=0
I don’t know if the peak shown is a crest heading south or something else, since it preceeds the maximum wind speeds.
Cool video of freighters hiding in Milwaukee Harbor during this latest storm.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FtfWs8_564
if it stays as cold as it is today it won’t take much for the lake to start to freeze over. hopefully that would mean less lake effect this year. the dry summer we had is the reason for the low water levels.
The lake will take a long time to freeze over and wit the wind it will keep the water open by bringing up the “warm” water from the lower levels where its 39³ for the most part.
SlimJim
Bill: How much water has left this planet in the past 10,000 years???
If our ocenas are warming there should be greater evaporation from them. Thus as the evaporated moisture laden clouds pass over land and cool off they should be droping more moisture on land. Where in North America are they recieving greater rainfall amounts than normal?
Bill – funny you should post this today. This morning I looked at the SpyglassHill webcam and thought the water looked really low on the pier and the rocks.
Last year I could tell the water level was higher compared to webcam pictures I saved from previous years.
That’s a great picture, thanks for sharing!
Great meteor shower tonight, everyone!! I saw 15 in about 1/2 hour – and they were AWESOME!!
Bill
…could the decreased precip. and increase evap. be due to climate change? You don’t offer a reason.
Also, —(in my opinion) injecting your political views into your weather blog borders on being unprofessional.
I wish that the stimulus spending and the bank bailout had not been necessary, however, please remember that the econ. collapse happened on “Dubyas” (and the Repubs.) watch. We were in a DEEP hole when Pres. Obama took office…and the stimulus and bailout started with Pres. Bush. If you want to fix blame, place it on who was in power between the years 2000 and 2008.
Have Pres. Obama’s policies fixed the mess in two years time? No, but I am hopeful, and wish him and our country well.
Sorry to go “off” on this, but you make no secret of your political views and they keep creeping into your weather blog…so, I thought I’d comment.
Bill
That’s funny, I see no instance where Bill made anything close to being a political comment. He simply stated that the amount of water lost from Lake Michigan is such a large number that it is hard to comprehend; similar to numbers thrown around about the bailouts.
Ummm… It’s kinda like it’s BILL’S blog and he can say whatever he wants. Fact of the matter is that Bill talks truth and that’s why he has so many readers.
If you have somewhat better political (or weather) views, get your blog going and send us a link.
Sorry dude but you’re showing your ignorance, not to mention your unprofessionalism. The economy was percolating along until the dems took over congress in 2007. Anyone with some degree of knowledge knows that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd aided and abetted the mortgage crisis and subsequent housing collapse. Even now the dems are tryng to ram through a 2,000 page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill, that they won’t let anyone read first. They apparently did not get the voters’ message on November 2. The hole has gotten deeper with Obama andd his amateur hour cast.
I heard (possibly just a rumor) several years ago that because they don’t want to have to dredge the Mississippi, they allow more water to go through the locks in Chicago to keep the water level high enough for shipping. Is this also a possibility for why the lake levels seem to keep dropping?
Here’s a summary of what Chicago is doing: http://waterwars.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/a-brief-history-of-the-chicago-diversion/
Interestingly, Canada currently diverts more water into the lakes (for hydropower projects) than Chicago takes out: http://waterwars.wordpress.com/2006/12/09/current-great-lakes-water-diversions/
Thanks for the information Randy!
Capped off our 8′ seawall a few years ago and the water still crested, three years later I had a nice beach in front of the house, floating dock on the ground but did find pliers I dropped of the dock 10 years ago.
So, who is stealing our fresh water and trucking/shipping it out of our Great Lakes ???
I say we have a problem, states around the Great Lakes.
Find the criminals and stop the poaching of fresh water.
Our water is not for sale and we are not giving it away…STOP THE THEFT.
It’s not theft. It’s our pals in CHINA. And they’re buying it. ALL of it.
I have seen a special on the Discovery channel that stated the Northern End of the lakes are less deep and the southern end is more deep due to the surface of the land north of the lakes is rising. This they explained is due to the great amount of perma frost loss. Therfore the weight on the land is allowing a rise in the earth and the bowl effect is shifting the lake levels. So more water is draining down the Mississippi.
Water is more valuable than oil, and we need to start being
a lot wiser about how we use it. Lawn care is a huge contributor to
water shortages, both in the great lakes area and abroad. People
water their lawns, wasting millions of gallons each year. What
little water’s left over is polluted by the fertilizers,
pesticides, etc. that go onto the lawn.
I lost my wedding ring in the surf in Mexico about 6 miles north of Playa Del Carmen about 10 years ago. You didn’t by chance find it, did you?