The Kenai Peninsula — River Levels & Flows

The Kenai, the Kasilof and the Anchor — salmon water south of Anchorage. Big Buoy shows live USGS river gauges across AK, with stage, flow and a 7-day trend for each, plus National Weather Service flood categories where they are published.

About The Kenai Peninsula

The Kenai River is why most people look this up, and it reads unlike almost any river in the lower 48. It runs out of Kenai Lake, through Skilak Lake, and on past Soldotna to the sea, and those two lakes do something a free-flowing river cannot: they settle glacial silt and buffer the flow, so the Kenai rises and falls slowly and holds its colour instead of blowing out. The three main-stem gauges — at Cooper Landing above Skilak, below the Skilak outlet, and at Soldotna near the bottom — bracket that system, and comparing them tells you more than any one of them alone. The rest of the peninsula behaves nothing like it. Sixmile and the Snow are steep glacial melt that peaks on a hot afternoon, and the Bradley above Homer is a dammed hydro system whose lower readings follow generation rather than rainfall. The Anchor and the Kasilof report level only and not discharge, which is worth knowing before you compare them with anything else here. Flow on this coast is snow and ice before it is rain, so the season runs backwards from an eastern river: high water arrives with warmth in June and July rather than with autumn storms. One gauge on the list, Glacier Creek at Girdwood, sits across Turnagain Arm on the far shore — nearer Anchorage than the peninsula, and included because it is the same weather arriving a few hours earlier.

How to read these gauges

Flow (discharge, in cubic feet per second) is comparable between gauges and is usually the better number for judging whether a river is up or down. Stage is the water height in feet above each gauge's own local datum, so it is local: the same 4 ft describes different rivers at two different gauges. Readings older than three times a gauge's reporting interval are shown as last reported rather than as current conditions, and a gauge that reports nothing is shown as not reported — never as zero.

Data: USGS National Water Information System. Flood categories: NOAA/National Weather Service.