How It Works
LakeStatus turns the current reservoir elevation into plain answers about ramps, docks, and bridges — and it is careful to tell you how sure it is.
Where the live level comes from
Each lake's current elevation is fetched from its operator when you visit the page, then cached briefly. Cadence varies by source: USGS updates roughly every 15 minutes; TVA, Georgia Power / Southern Company, and the USACE Tulsa District publish daily; the USACE CWMS feed updates hourly-ish. The freshness label is scaled to the source, so a daily reading reads as "today" rather than stale.
How sure we are: the usability tiers
Water-depth usability depends on a reference elevation, and its honesty comes from where that elevation came from:
- Surveyed — an end-of-concrete elevation from a USACE survey sheet. This gives a definitive Open / Marginal / Closed verdict per ramp.
- Derived — an authoritative-but-not-survey reference (for example a Corps closure notice stating the pool at which a ramp goes dry). It can drive a verdict, but a hedged one, clearly labeled as not survey-grade.
- Estimated or unknown — no per-ramp verdict. The page instead shows a lake-level best-guess from the current level against the lake's normal operating band, with a link to the managing agency to confirm.
Corps operational status is separate from water depth
For some lakes the Army Corps of Engineers publishes a live operational status for a ramp — whether they have opened or closed it. That is a management decision, not a measure of water depth, so LakeStatus shows it as a separate element with its own "updated X ago" freshness line. An operational "Open" never implies there is enough water, and the two are never conflated.
The pool gauge
The pool gauge shows where the lake is sitting within its normal band. The full-pool and winter-pool marks are the operator's own published values; the low mark is a LakeStatus estimate of the bottom of the normal operating range.
Ramp access tiers
Ramps are grouped by who runs them: public (Corps, state, local, or other agency), marina (commercial, usually a launch fee), and private (clubs, camps, and organizations that are not open drop-in access). Private ramps are listed for completeness and contact but carry no usability verdict.