Lake Glance — inland lake conditions

Wind, water level and a 6-hour outlook for your lakes, one click away. Live USGS gauge and NWS forecast data.

Lake Glance — inland lake conditions, one click from your toolbar Is my lake worth the drive right now? Lake Glance answers that in about a second. Click the toolbar icon and you get a brief: wind speed, the direction it is blowing from, gusts, the water level and which way it has moved over the past day, and the next six hours of forecast wind. No page to load, no dashboard to scan, no account to make. WHO IT IS FOR Weeknight sailors who check the wind five times on a sailing day and just want to know whether to leave work early. Weekend planners comparing three lakes on a Friday to pick Saturday's destination. Anglers watching water temperature and a falling level through the summer. Reservoir watchers tracking drawdown against the depth their ramp stops working. WHAT YOU SEE Your primary lake sits at the top of the popup, with the numbers first and the labels second. Wind is shown as a figure, an arrow, and a compass label, because an arrow alone gets misread and a label alone is slow. Underneath sits the water level with a trend arrow and the exact change over 24 hours, then a small chart of the next six hours with your own ideal wind range marked on it. Every reading carries its age — "22 min ago", "1 h ago" — and the name of the weather station it came from, with the distance to your lake. That matters: National Weather Service observations come from land stations, sometimes several miles away, and wind on the water can differ. The extension tells you where the number came from rather than implying a sensor sitting on your lake. Your other saved lakes sit below as one-line rows: name, wind, direction, level trend, and a coloured dot. Sort them by wind, alphabetically, by distance, or keep your own order. Tap any row to promote it to the top. THE TOOLBAR BADGE The icon itself shows your primary lake's wind speed, coloured green when it is inside the range you chose, amber when it is close, grey when it is not. You get an answer without opening anything. ALERTS THAT DO NOT NAG Set a rule — say, wind between 8 and 18 knots, Friday and Saturday, between 3 and 8 pm — and Lake Glance notifies you when the lake enters that range. You can also watch a water level and be told when it crosses a mark you set, which is useful when a ramp or a hazard has a known depth. Three things keep alerts from becoming noise. A rule fires at most once a day. It only re-arms after conditions have clearly left the range and come back, so wind hovering at the boundary cannot spam you. And quiet hours plus a global mute are there when you want silence. A FISHING VIEW Switch any lake to its fishing view for water temperature where the gauge reports it, the level trend, and the sky and precipitation chance for the hours ahead. WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM Directly from the source, with nothing in between. Water level and temperature come from U.S. Geological Survey gauges; wind, forecasts and active weather alerts come from the National Weather Service. There is no server of ours in the middle, no scraping, no third-party weather vendor. Every card links straight to the official USGS gauge page and the NWS point forecast so you can verify a number or dig deeper. More than 700 gauged lakes and reservoirs across 49 states ship with the extension, searchable the moment you install it. Readings that get old are labelled old. Wind more than 90 minutes stale and gauge readings more than six hours stale are flagged rather than presented as current, and when no station is reporting the card falls back to the forecast and says so. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account, no tracking, no analytics, no telemetry. Your list of lakes lives in your browser's own sync storage and follows you across your own machines. The extension asks for only two permissions up front — storage and alarms — plus access to the two government APIs. Notifications and location are optional and requested only when you use the feature that needs them. Available in 42 languages, with units in knots, mph, m/s or km/h, feet or metres, and degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius. SAFETY Conditions data is informational only. It is not a substitute for official National Weather Service warnings, and it is not a substitute for your own judgement on the water. Lake Glance never tells you to go — it shows you data against ranges you chose, and leaves the decision where it belongs. Independent project, built on open government data. Not affiliated with USGS, NOAA or Lakebrief.