Are Winnie Water Levels Higher than Normal?

[LIforrelaxin]

So we are currently at 503.95 and before the lake started to re-act to all the efforts to bring the level down it got up to 504.18 as JeffK indicated around 1/5/2023.....

now 1/10 of a foot is 1.2 inches and the delta is .23.... so the lake is down roughly 2.75 inches....

Now generally the lake is down around 503 ft. at this point..... so there is still .95 feet to be drawn down... if they can keep the rate of drop it will be back around its statistical norm in about 3-4 weeks.... hopefully weather will cooperate and that time line will move up..... and they will not have to increase flows into the lake form any of the surround lakes or ponds that feed into Winnipesaukee...

[jeffk]

Checking today, the lake levels went down slightly and then back up slightly over the last 4 days. It's still about a foot over typical levels for this time of year. There is a note in the Operations Updates on the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services Winnipesaukee lake level page that the dam outflow will be increased to 1920 CFS, its maximum but the Lakeport dam page does NOT reflect that change yet. At 1920 CFS, the lake drops about an inch per day, barring no significant additional rain. That means it will take about 12 days to get the lake down a foot to the typical fall/winter levels. They MUST be able to do that before the spring snowmelt runoff and "April showers" because they cannot dump all that water downstream (downstream is dealing with their own local runoff) in the spring. Instead, they let the runoff fill the lake back up and minimize the impact downstream.