The Upper Peninsula — River Levels & Flows

Lake Superior steelhead rivers and the big-water Menominee, from the Keweenaw to the Soo. Big Buoy shows live USGS river gauges across MI, with stage, flow and a 7-day trend for each, plus National Weather Service flood categories where they are published.

About The Upper Peninsula

The Upper Peninsula is two coasts either side of a divide, and the rivers on each behave differently enough that a reading means different things depending on which side it comes from. North of the divide the Ontonagon, the Presque Isle, the Dead and the Salmon Trout run short and steep into Lake Superior off the Huron Mountains and the Keweenaw, over hard rock and old copper country; they answer rain and snowmelt within hours and fall away just as quickly. South of it the Escanaba, the Ford, the Sturgeon and the Menominee run longer and slower into Lake Michigan through sand and cedar swamp, hold their colour after a storm and take days rather than hours to settle. Both coasts get lake-run fish. Steelhead and salmon push in on high water in spring and autumn, so the useful question at these gauges is usually not the level itself but whether it has just come up. Two cautions on the list below. Several entries are dam and reservoir stations rather than river reaches — the Greenwood and Schweitzer sites in the Escanaba headwaters report what the works are doing, not what the weather is. And the Tahquamenon, draining the eastern flats, runs tannin-brown all year: that colour is peat rather than sediment, and it says nothing about how recently the river rose.

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.