Okanagan Lake starting to recover from unusually low water level

It’s been a struggle this month for Shaun Reimer to get Okanagan Lake levels to start rising again after he drew them down over the winter.

Reimer is the section head, public safety and protection, for the Ministry of Forests. As such, it’s his job to control the flow of water out of the lake through the dam in Penticton.

“We are low,” he told iNFOnews.ca. “Even our average for this time of year is about 15 centimetres higher. The reason we’re as low as we are, it’s sort of a combination of me taking it there because of the forecast we received from the B.C. Forecast Centre back in February. Along with that, we’ve had very low inflow into the lake this year, even starting before Christmas.”

Other than a short warm period in January, the flows into the lake have been below average each week.

“It’s very difficult keeping the lake up when we have such low inflows,” Reimer said.

It is now at 341.45 metres above sea level, more than one metre below full pool of 342.48 metres.

That’s still about 30 cm above the all-time low recorded for the lake. Reimer could see that on a graph but could not easily determine when that happened. It could have been before some of the existing lake level controls were in place.

“We’ve come up a few centimetres,” Reimer said. “It’s about time. We’re a little delayed because it’s been so cool.”

That’s going to change dramatically with temperatures forecast to rise to 27 Celsius in the Okanagan valley bottom on the weekend.

READ MORE: After long cool spring, heat is on the way for Kamloops, Okanagan

“I want to see that mid and low elevation snow come down now,” Reimer said. “Last year, the snow lingered a little bit later than we would have liked. It lingered into June when we got a lot of rain. That’s when it created a little more of that high water in some local areas.”

With higher temperatures in the valley bottom, he’s hoping it doesn’t get that hot at higher elevations.

Even if it does, there may not be a lot of runoff partly because the ground is so dry.

READ MORE: March one of the driest on record in Okanagan, Kamloops

“Some of the snow that’s up here, a lot of it will go to ground,” Reimer said. “The other thing this warm weather does is, it compresses the snow, so it makes it a little easier to start the melt once May does come. We want to have that. We don’t want it to linger.”

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