Drought and recovery on Lake Travis
Lake Travis is a flood-control reservoir, and it behaves like one. It is supposed to rise and fall. The daily record kept since 1940 — more than 30,627 days — shows a lake that spends much of its life well below the level people think of as normal, punctuated by recoveries that arrive far faster than anyone expects.
The clearest number in the whole record: 37 of 83 complete years — about 45% — went by without Lake Travis once touching its full pool of 681.0 feet. Being below full is not the exception on this lake. It is the ordinary condition.
The two great droughts
Two periods dominate the low end of the record. The drought of record in the early 1950s took the lake to 614.18 feet on 1951-08-14 — the lowest it has been since it first filled. In 1951 the lake never rose above 627.6 feet all year.
The second is closer to living memory: the 2011–2015 drought, which produced four consecutive years with annual minimums in the 618–626 foot range and bottomed at 618.64 feet in September 2013. For anyone who bought a dock in the 2000s, that stretch is the reference point for what “low” means.
Lowest annual minimums on record
| Year | Minimum (ft) | Date | That year's high |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1951 | 614.18 | 1951-08-14 | 627.6 |
| 1952 | 614.85 | 1952-07-01 | 679.7 |
| 1963 | 615.02 | 1963-11-08 | 665.7 |
| 1964 | 616.46 | 1964-09-16 | 644.3 |
| 2013 | 618.64 | 2013-09-19 | 631.9 |
| 2014 | 621.96 | 2014-11-21 | 630.5 |
Recovery is violent, not gradual
This is the part that surprises people, and it is the most useful thing in the record. Lake Travis does not creep back. It comes back in weeks.
The year after the drought of record, 1952, the lake swung 64.9 feet — from 614.9 up to 679.7, essentially full — inside a single calendar year. In 2015, the drought that had defined the previous four years ended with a 53.3-foot rise, from 623.3 in January to 676.6 by year's end. Neither was a slow refill. Both were a handful of storms.
| Year | Range (ft) | Low → high |
|---|---|---|
| 1952 | 64.9 | 614.9 → 679.7 |
| 2007 | 57.3 | 644.1 → 701.4 |
| 2015 | 53.3 | 623.3 → 676.6 |
| 1963 | 50.7 | 615.0 → 665.7 |
| 2018 | 50.4 | 653.9 → 704.3 |
Why the rebound is so steep
There is a physical reason, and it is the same one that makes forecasting this lake interesting. Lake Travis is a flooded canyon, so its surface area collapses as it drops — roughly 19,000 acres at full pool, but only about 7,200 acres near the 1951 low. That is a factor of 2.6.
Because elevation change is storage divided by surface area, the same volume of inflow raises a low lake far faster than a full one. Ten thousand cubic feet per second running for a day lifts a full Lake Travis about a foot; it lifts a drought-stricken one closer to 2.75 feet. The lake is at its most responsive precisely when it is lowest — which is why a single wet spring can undo four dry years, and why forecasts during a drought have to be read with more care, not less. The methodology page works through that arithmetic in full.
The other direction
The record's high end is a reminder that this is a flood-control lake first. The highest elevation ever recorded is 710.31 feet on 1991-12-26 — some 29.3 feet above full pool, deep into the flood pool the reservoir exists to hold. Ramps close for high water just as surely as for low, which is why this site never reports a ramp as “open” on the basis of elevation alone.
Where it is now: 675.21 ft — 5.79 ft below full pool. See the current level and 10-day forecast, or the full daily record on the history page.
Source: Texas Water Development Board daily record for Lake Travis, beginning 1940-09-30. Years with fewer than 300 days of record are excluded from the counts above so a partial year cannot masquerade as a dry one.