How do Lakes GEt Water?

by Howard Miller, Cheney Lake Watershed Outreach Coordinator
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How do lakes get full of water? The simple answer is by water entering the lake and being stored there, but it’s a bit more complex than that. Streams that fill lakes have 2 types of flow; base flow and flood flow. Base flow is the level the stream runs when there is no external overbank water entering the stream. Flood flow is overbank flow from uplands entering the stream and often carries soil particles, nutrients and chemicals.

You may have noticed the Cheney Lake Watershed emphasizes the importance of water infiltration. Why is that? Water that infiltrates goes through carbon layers as it enters the soil and heads downward toward a confining layer. Why is that important? Bottled water we buy in the store is purified with carbon filters. That cleaner water hits a confining layer of rock or clay and flows laterally until it finds a way to surface again. We call those springs and seeps. That water may go underground again but eventually it will resurface and end up in a stream.

If you don’t have good infiltration the water runs laterally on top of soil carrying soil and part of the fertilizer and chemicals we added to the system to grow a crop. Part of the water infiltrated is used by our plants to grow but none of the water that runs off our fields reaches the crop roots. Cleaner water in streams equals cleaner water entering Cheney Lake. Soil entering the lake becomes sediment and over time fills the lake. If we can increase the base flow and increase the amount of water entering Cheney Lake, over time the result will be more available for the citizens of Wichita for personal use and less that will have to be released downstream due to flashy rainfall events.

The best part is that the City of Wichita is willing to help us financially if we do things on our farms that improve water quality in Cheney Lake. The obvious thing here is that it takes rain to create infiltration or runoff but there’s a big difference in the quality of water that enters Cheney Lake depending on which route the water takes to the lake.

Check the water level in Cheney Lake at this Army Corps of Engineers, Tulsa District link, https://www.swt-wc.usace.army.mil/CHEN.lakepage.html .