LakeWatch publishes near-real-time water level readings for 28 inland lakes in Oakland County, Michigan, plus weather conditions and seasonal targets. The dashboard is a fast, mobile-friendly way to check your lake's current level against the legal summer or winter target without scrolling through PDF bulletins on the county's site. Each monitored lake gets its own subdomain (for example, lowerstraitslake.com, biglake.lowerstraitslake.com) so the URL is easy to share with neighbors.
All water level readings shown on LakeWatch are aggregated from publicly published reports of the Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner (WRC). The original bulletins are available on oakgov.com. Our automated scraper checks the WRC's site twice a week during the active reporting season, parses any new readings, and updates the dashboards within hours. We don't add to, alter, or interpret the numbers — we re-publish them in a more accessible format.
Weather data is pulled from the Open-Meteo public API, which sources its observations from the National Weather Service. Readings are cached for one hour to limit upstream load.
If you live on a lake in Oakland County, the lake's water level affects your dock, your boat access, your shoreline, your basement, and the fishing. Knowing whether the level is currently at or above or below the legal seasonal target is genuinely useful information that the official county PDF bulletins don't make easy to track over time. LakeWatch closes that gap.
The project started as a personal weekend tool for our own home lake and grew to cover every monitored lake in the county after several neighboring Lake Improvement Boards asked if we'd add theirs. It has always been free, ad-supported, and run as a community resource — not a business.
LakeWatch is a static React dashboard backed by a small PHP API on shared hosting. The scrapers run as scheduled GitHub Actions: a Puppeteer job pulls each WRC bulletin PDF, parses the readings, and POSTs them to the API for storage. The codebase is open-source.
LakeWatch is operated by an independent volunteer. It is not affiliated with Oakland County, the Office of the Water Resources Commissioner, any Lake Improvement Board, or any real estate company. We don't endorse and aren't endorsed by any of those bodies; we just republish their public data.
Bug reports, feature requests, corrections, or media inquiries: see the Contact page.