Lake and Reservoir Levels Nationwide

Informational only. Not for navigation, safety, emergency, financial, medical, or legal decisions. Check the official source before you rely on it.

Current pool elevation, 24-hour change and hourly history for about 800 Army Corps and TVA reservoirs, plus NOAA lake, pool and river gauges, in one clean JSON or CSV. Search by lake name or state, or list the lakes first. Data comes from official public government feeds.

Who it's for: marinas, fishing guides, lake rental hosts, boating apps, newsletters, and anyone tracking lake levels on a schedule.

Input

• Default run (no search): Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, the same as before. The two checkboxes turn each one off.
• Lake name: part of a name, for example Table Rock or Lake Cumberland.
• State: 2-letter code, for example MO. Combine with a name to narrow it.
• Mode: readings (default) fetches current levels. list returns matching lakes from the built-in index with no readings, so you can browse first.
• Sources: corps, tva, noaa (all by default). NOAA river gauges are left out of searches unless you turn on Include NOAA river gauges.
• Max lakes: default 25 (readings up to 200, list up to 2,000). This keeps each run's cost predictable.
• Live cross-check against NOAA: on by default. See Self-check.
• Advanced: TVA site codes (for example KYDK2), Army Corps CWMS series objects, NOAA gauge IDs (for example SMLI2), Hours of history (1 to 168). When a name or state search is set, the two default lakes are only included if they match the search.

Output

The first 17 fields are unchanged from the earlier version: source, site, series, observedAt, observedAtLocal, poolElevationFt, change24hFt, tailwaterFt, dischargeCfs, historyCount, history, note, error, qcStatus, qcNotes, sourceUrl, retrievedAt. New fields are added at the end: lakeName, state, latitude, longitude, siteId, office, stageFt, flowCfs, crossCheck, crossCheckNote, noaaCheckLid, noaaCheckFt, noaaCheckDeltaFt.

• Army Corps rows report pool elevation only, so tailwater and discharge are null.
• TVA publishes only the last 48 hours.
• NOAA rows put the reading in stageFt as NOAA publishes it. NOAA does not state the datum, so for some lake gauges it is the lake elevation and for others it is height above the gauge's own zero. poolElevationFt is null on NOAA rows.

Self-check

Every row gets qcStatus (ok or flagged) and qcNotes. Rows are flagged, not dropped.

• Cross-checked lakes: the lake index was matched against a second public source on Oct 17, 2026. crossCheck is ok only where the two sources agreed within 0.30 ft. Every other Corps or TVA lake has crossCheck flagged and its rows are always qcStatus flagged, with the reason in crossCheckNote.
• Not every lake has a second source. About 44% of the Army Corps lakes (338 of 769) and 27 of 43 TVA codes have a matching NOAA gauge. The rest cannot be cross-checked automatically.
• Live NOAA check: for cross-checked lakes, each run compares the reading with NOAA at the closest time (within 20 minutes) and flags gaps over 0.5 ft.
• Also flagged: a level outside a plausible range, a newest reading more than 6 hours old or in the future, an hour-to-hour change over 1 ft on a lake, and source errors.
• A bad lake name, state or code returns a row with the error field filled instead of failing the run.

No-code setup

1. Run it on a schedule. In Apify Console, create a schedule (for example every morning at 6 AM) and pick this Actor. Guide: https://docs.apify.com/platform/schedules
2. Send results to Google Sheets. Add the Google Sheets Import & Export Actor as an integration: https://apify.com/lukaskrivka/google-sheets
3. Zapier or Make. Zapier: https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/zapier . Make: https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/make

Disclaimer

Informational only. Not for navigation, safety, emergency, financial, medical, or legal decisions. Check the official source before you rely on it.

This is an independent tool by Standard Work Co. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any government agency named here. Agency names are used only to say where the data comes from.

The data comes from public government sources and is passed through as published, only reformatted. Government data can be preliminary, late, missing, revised, or wrong, and this tool can fail too. This output is not an official government record.

Provided "as is" with no warranty of any kind, including accuracy, completeness, or timeliness. You are responsible for checking the official source before acting on anything here.

Not for boating, swimming, fishing safety, navigation, flood, or emergency decisions. For current official conditions, check the agency's own site and follow posted warnings.

Data sources and credits

• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) lake and dam observed data: tva.com.
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Corps Water Management System (CWMS) Data API, cwms-data.usace.army.mil. USACE does not endorse this tool.
• NOAA National Weather Service, National Water Prediction Service (api.water.noaa.gov). NOAA and NWS do not endorse this tool.

U.S. government works are not subject to U.S. copyright protection (17 U.S.C. 105). Any copyright in this Actor covers only its code and documentation, not the underlying government data.