About LakePulse UK
LakePulse UK is a dashboard for the kind of sailor who checks three weather apps and a gauge site before committing to the drive. We put it all on one screen: wind and gust forecasts, live water level from the EA gauge, a 7-day hourly forecast, weather radar and launch maps, solunar fishing times — and a plain-spoken score for whether it's worth rigging up.
Where the data comes from
- Water level — Environment Agency real-time hydrometric readings, direct from each lake's gauge (typically 15-minute to hourly cadence), via the flood-monitoring open API.
- Wind, gusts & direction — Open-Meteo forecasts (Met Office UKV, NOAA GFS, ECMWF, DWD ICON and others), resolved to each lake's exact coordinates.
- Radar & maps — RainViewer radar tiles over CARTO / OpenStreetMap base maps; slips, marinas, and clubs from OpenStreetMap.
- Solunar times — computed on the fly for each lake's timezone from standard astronomical approximations. Solunar tables are an angling tradition with little scientific support — treat them as a tiebreaker, not a forecast.
How the sailing score works
Every hour is scored 0–10 against your sailor profile. The default Cruising profile gives sustained wind between 6 and 16 knots full marks; Beginner · Kayak centers on 3–10 with stricter gust and cold penalties; Performance · Wing shifts the band to 8–22 and forgives gusts. Gusts running far above the sustained wind, rain probability, and cold air each apply further penalties. Pick your profile on any lake dashboard — the whole site retunes.
No account, no tracking
Saved lakes, your profile, and wind alerts live in your browser's storage — LakePulse UK keeps no user accounts and stores no personal data on its servers. (Your browser does fetch forecasts and map tiles directly from Open-Meteo, the Environment Agency, RainViewer, and OpenStreetMap — those providers see the request, not us.) Alerts run as browser notifications while a LakePulse UK tab is open. You can also embed a free live-conditions widget for any lake on your club or marina site.
Disclaimer
LakePulse UK is an independent tool built on public data. Gauges fail, sensors ice over, and weather models are wrong sometimes. Nothing here is a substitute for official warnings, local knowledge, or your own judgment — see the full data disclaimer. Always check conditions at the slip before launching, wear appropriate gear for the water temperature, and when in doubt, stay ashore.
Contact & corrections
LakePulse UK is built on public data, and mistakes happen. If a reading, lake name, or link looks wrong, email [email protected] and we'll check it against the source gauge or map — corrections land in the next data refresh.