Frequently asked questions

Water levels come from Water Survey of Canada gauges (ECCC’s real-time hydrometric API), which report every 5 minutes to hourly. Wind forecasts come from Open-Meteo, which serves government models including Environment Canada’s GEM and HRDPS, NOAA’s GFS, and Europe’s ICON. Radar is RainViewer. Launch ramps and marinas come from OpenStreetMap. Everything is public data — we match gauges to lakes and present it.

A 0–10 rating for every hour: full marks for wind inside your comfort band, minus penalties for gust factor, rain/thunderstorm probability, and cold air. It comes in three profiles — Beginner/Kayak (3–10 kt), Cruising dinghy (6–16 kt), and Performance/Wing (8–22 kt) — and you can switch profiles on any lake dashboard.

No and no. LakePulse Canada is free and account-free. Saved lakes, sailor profiles, and wind alerts are stored in your own browser (localStorage) — nothing about you reaches our servers because there are no servers holding user data.

Set an alert on the Saved page (“tell me when Lake X is between 8 and 16 knots”). While any LakePulse Canada tab is open, the site periodically checks your alerts against live forecasts and fires a browser notification when a window opens. No email, no push service, no server — your browser does the checking.

We list lakes with an active Water Survey of Canada gauge reporting water level. Some lakes are gauged only for flow (discharge), seasonally, or not at all — those are excluded rather than shown with broken data. If your lake has a gauge we missed, the station number on each page helps you verify.

The ECCC real-time API currently publishes water level and flow but not water temperature. The dashboard is honest about that and shows an estimate derived from recent air temperatures on the fishing tab — treat it as a rough proxy, not a gauge reading.

Wind updates on page view from the latest model run (Open-Meteo best-match, HRDPS-class near-term). Water data refreshes from the Water Survey of Canada every 5–60 minutes per gauge. Each reading shows how old it is (“12 min ago”) so you can judge for yourself.

Partially. Model grids smooth terrain, so valley and ridge winds can be stronger or shifted versus the model point. Use our numbers as the background flow, respect gust factors, and weight local knowledge heavily on alpine water.

WSC gauges report water level in metres above the station’s own datum — for big lakes it tracks the true surface elevation, for smaller ones it behaves like a local stage height. Either way the trend is what matters for ramps and shoals. Our glossary has a full guide.

Yes — every lake has a Fishing tab with solunar feeding times (computed for the lake’s timezone), live water temperature where a sensor exists, temperature-driven species notes, and best-fishing windows for the next 48 hours combining all of it.

Yes — the embed builder at /embed generates a free iframe widget for any lake in our database, in light or dark, that always shows live data. No key, no maintenance.

No. We are an independent site that uses their excellent public data. Always verify conditions against official sources before making decisions on the water.