LakeForecast program monitors water quality

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Beach season is right around the corner, but before you go running into the water, you might want to run and check the water quality with the Lake Forecast. I'm with Caitlin McFlavey with Clean Lakes Alliance. What is a Lake Forecast? Yeah, a Lake Forecast is Clean Lakes Alliance's water quality monitoring program. This program is run entirely by volunteers who get trained up to collect some basic water quality conditions at over 80 locations throughout the chain of lakes. They're looking at if there's algal blooms happening at the lakes, what the water temperature is like, what the clarity is like, and some other things that are helpful for people to know before enjoying our lakes. Now, you keep tapping this thing. This is how they actually test the water quality.

[00:00:37]Can you Can you tell me what this is and what they do when they come out here to actually do the test? Yeah, so this is a turbidity tube. This is a pretty simple tool, really easily for people to look at the clarity of the water, the turbidity of the water, which basically means how cloudy, how clear is the water. Obviously, we want clearer water, a lot nicer for people to enjoy. And so, what monitors will do is they'll go to their site, they'll go walk out a little bit into about knee-deep water, they'll collect a water sample, and then what they're going to do is look vertically down this tube, which helps us assess the turbidity of the water, which then they'll report into Lake Forecast.

[00:01:13]>> All right. What What are they looking for when they actually look down into the tube? Yeah, there's a Secchi disk at the very bottom of this tube, a fancy term, and very great limnological tool that's been used for a very, very long time. What they're looking for is this black and white checkered pattern at the very bottom of this tube. And what they'll do is they'll take their sunglasses off, and they'll have the sun to their back.

[00:01:34]They'll look vertically down the tube, and they're slowly going to release water out of this tube until they can see that black and white checkered pattern. This is a tool that's used in offshore environments as well as nearshore environments, which is what our Lake Forecast program focuses on.

[00:01:48]All right, Caitlin, thank you. The Lake Forecast app and website totally free to use. We'll have links for those on our website wkow.com. Reporting in Madison, I'm Dana Fulton.