Frequently asked questions

Water levels, elevations, and water temperatures come from USGS gauges (the National Water Information System), which report every 15 minutes to hourly. Wind forecasts come from Open-Meteo, which serves government models like NOAA’s HRRR and GFS and Europe’s ICON. Radar is RainViewer. Launch ramps and marinas come from OpenStreetMap. Everything is public data — we match gauges to lakes and present it.

A 0–10 rating for every hour: full marks for wind inside your comfort band, minus penalties for gust factor, rain/thunderstorm probability, and cold air. It comes in three profiles — Beginner/Kayak (3–10 kt), Cruising dinghy (6–16 kt), and Performance/Wing (8–22 kt) — and you can switch profiles on any lake dashboard.

No and no. LakePulse is free and account-free. Saved lakes, sailor profiles, and wind alerts are stored in your own browser (localStorage) — nothing about you reaches our servers because there are no servers holding user data.

Set an alert on the Saved page (“tell me when Lake X is between 8 and 16 knots”). While any LakePulse tab is open, the site periodically checks your alerts against live forecasts and fires a browser notification when a window opens. No email, no push service, no server — your browser does the checking.

We list lakes with an active USGS gauge reporting water level (gage height or reservoir elevation). A few famous lakes — like Lake Powell and Lake Okeechobee — are managed by the Bureau of Reclamation or state agencies instead of USGS, so they are excluded rather than shown with broken data.

Only some gauges carry a temperature sensor (USGS parameter 00010). When one exists we show live readings; otherwise the dashboard says so honestly and the fishing page falls back to air temperature as a rough proxy.

Wind updates on page view from the latest model run (Open-Meteo best-match, HRRR-class near-term). Water data refreshes from USGS every 15–60 minutes per sensor. Each reading shows how old it is (“12 min ago”) so you can judge for yourself.

Partially. Model grids smooth terrain, so valley and ridge winds can be stronger or shifted versus the model point. Use our numbers as the background flow, respect gust factors, and weight local knowledge heavily on alpine water.

Gage height (00065) is water height above an arbitrary local datum — trends matter, absolutes do not. Reservoir elevation (00062) is altitude above sea level — comparable across years, useful for drought and ramp status. Our glossary has a full guide.

Yes — every lake has a Fishing tab with solunar feeding times (computed for the lake’s timezone), live water temperature where a sensor exists, temperature-driven species notes, and best-fishing windows for the next 48 hours combining all of it.

Yes — the embed builder at /embed generates a free iframe widget for any lake in our database, in light or dark, that always shows live data. No key, no maintenance.

No. We are an independent site that uses their excellent public data. Always verify conditions against official sources before making decisions on the water.