Quote:
Originally Posted by emathias
It depends on what you mean by "very much." The lake at Calumet Harbor in the past 10 years has fluctuated by as much as 2 feet in a single 12-month span and historically (past century) you need to account for at least a 5-foot swing between long-term monthly lows and monthly highs. If you went with min-max within each month (and not just average), lake levels probably fluctuate up to 7 feet from one-day extremes over the long term.
I think the river is somewhat protected from the extremes, but I know I've seen it (the river) vary in level by a good 18 inches just since New Years.
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Yeah, a few feet does not count as "very much" given the fact that many rivers have floods that can be as much as 40 feet above the normal level.
Also remember that the river level can be controlled by the Corps of Engineers and drained into the lake or into the canal depending on if the lake is flooding or if the river is flooding.
In other words its very unlikely that the main branch ever fluctuates more than a foot or two because the highest it can get is the level of the canal (South Branch) or the level of the lake, whichever is lower.
The record high and low levels for the lake are only 8 feet apart, 576 is the low and 582 is the high. Over one year the average level might fluctuate 2 feet maximum, it takes an awful lot of water to make the lake change much more than that. Right now the lake is just under 578 feet, the long term average for April is 578.7 feet, so we are just under normal. I imagine with our particularly cold winter this year with the ice levels on Michigan relatively high, we should probably get above normal since surface evaporation was limited by the ice this winter.
The only big daily fluctuations that happen in the lake are weather system related and result in seiches. A seiche is a giant wave formed when water from one side of the lake is driven by high winds to the other side of the lake raising water levels. Its very similar to a Storm Surge caused by a hurricane. Seiches can be as high as 10 feet and are extremely dangerous. Luckily for Downtown Chicago, the locks at the mouth of the river are designed to block such surges from heading up (down???) river and into the downtown area.