LAKE WINNEBAGO (NBC 26) — You may have seen photos of low water levels across Lake Winnebago.
Chadwick Shaw, the Chief of the Fox River Operations for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it's important to note there are four gages around Lake Winnebago that gives us our lake levels.
"One in Menasha, one in Oshkosh, one in Fond Du Lac and one in Stockbridge. We use an average of those four gages to give us our lake level average. That levels corresponds to the crest of the Menasha dam. Currently we are about one inch level compared to the last 70 year average have been for the first couple weeks of March,” Shaw said.
But while that is the case, Shaw says they want to make sure they hold down the lake until all the ice is mostly gone.
"We do that for things such as ice shoves to try to limit that damage. The lake is currently rising at a slow rate. We have the majority of the gates open at both the Neenah and Menasha dams but the lake is still going up. We have more water coming into the lake than what we are discharging through those two dams at this point," Shaw said.
On a historical stand point Shaw said as boating season normally kicks off during Memorial Day weekend he says right now though levels are low, Lake Winnebago is still on point to reach it's target.
"We are 17 inches lower than what our level target is. In the past 20 years we’ve only missed that target three times and those three years we missed it by less than three quarters of an inch," Shaw said.
Shaw also said it's important to note that the water coming into Lake Winnebago is not controlled by dams.
"That is coming through the Wolf River and the Upper Fox River. They’re coming in through the Oshkosh channel. They come into the lake, from there we manipulate the level by the use of the Neenah and Menasha dams to discharge water down to the lower Fox River and that goes to Green Bay,” Shaw said.
Keith Cooley, the senior forecaster with the National Weather Service of Northeast Wisconsin said right now we’ve been below normal for precipitation.
Locally, he said we’ve been about an inch below normal on liquid precipitation since January 1, 2021.
“For the season so far for on the season’s snow fall totals, we are about close to 18 inches below normal. We kind of missed out on some of the bigger winter systems this season as well which is kind of leading to less run off to the area rivers and in which in turn causes a lower Lake Winnebago level,” Cooley said.
Cooley said if we look at this year compared to some of the past years a lot of the time when the spring snow melt occurs often times either the ground is frozen or we have an excess of snow depth on the ground which causes the snow to run off more rapidly.
Cooley says this year we’ve actually had more of a shallow frost depth in the ground.
“So most of that came out early and as the snow melted off, a lot of the water that was in the snow pact actually was absorbed into the soils, so we don’t see a quick runoff into area streams and rivers so that kind of slows the water getting into the lake,” Cooley said.
Cooley also said one of the other issues that is keeping most of that water from running off into area streams and rivers, even if we do get rainfall right away is that the soil moisture is either near normal or below normal for this time of year.
“Based on the drought monitor compared across most of the upper Midwest and in Northeast Wisconsin we’ve been labeled as a D0 which basically means we are abnormally dry for our soil conditions. It basically puts us in the early stages of drought so that also allows a lot of that water to be absorbed directly into the soil and doesn’t turn into just sudden runoff into streams and rivers. That in turn would take the water a longer period of time to reach Winnebago,” Cooley said.
He said right now the rivers and streams have been slowly increasing in the amount of flow in the rivers with all the snow melt upstream and the higher terrain in Northern Wisconsin.
“So some of that water is still making it’s way down the river from some of the snow melt earlier. So it will just take a little bit of time, but we are starting to seem of the rises in the area rivers. So there is hope that those water levels will start coming up,” Cooley said.
He said right now they’re keeping an eye on the Wolf River near New London as they have seen the water there begin to rise.
Now as for the future, Cooley gave us an outlook on what we can expect between now and into the next three months towards the middle of June.
“We should start seeing both the river levels starting to come up a little more. Not a flooding situation, it doesn’t look like it at this point. But all of that extra water would start making its way down there to hopefully improve the conditions on Lake Winnebago,” Cooley said.
Additional resources on lake levels can be found here.
