Revised forecasts from the Army Corps of Engineers predict all but one of the Great Lakes will have significantly higher water levels this summer, with Lake Ontario expected to end up nearly a foot-and-a-half higher this summer than last.
Green line shows forecast rise, red shaded area is best and worst that could happen, blue is average.
At Friday morning’s reading, the lake at Rochester stood at 247.975 feet, up another 0.125 (just over a tenth of an inch) from Thursday.
Ontario is expected to rise another seven inches by the end of this month and reach its peak level for the year. That will top out 17 inches higher than last summer, which was a drought year. This year has brought unusually heavy spring rains, and shoreline residents and officials also blame the new Plan 2014 regulations for the high water levels flooding their homes.
The International Joint Commission and St. Lawrence River Board say the problem is almost entirely due to the rains, which are still going on and are flooding the entire system.
Meteorologists at the Michigan-based MLive.com website say they’ve done some calculating, and figure based on the estimates that a mind-blowing 15 trillion gallons of additional water will have flowed into the Great Lakes system by the end of this month. They doubt any other region in the world will gain that much fresh water in such a short period of time.