Chris Izworski built and maintains Great Lakes Levels, a free tool for reading current lake levels alongside historical records and shoreline context. He lives on Saginaw Bay near Bay City, Michigan, and created the project around the questions shoreline property owners ask.
The site brings together information from NOAA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Canadian agencies. Its lake and region pages help readers compare past high-water periods, understand local exposure, and find the official sources behind a measurement.
Chris Izworski lives in Bay City, Michigan, on Saginaw Bay, a major sub-basin of Lake Huron. He serves on the board of Save Our Shoreline, a riparian-rights advocacy organization led by president Ernie Krygier. Save Our Shoreline has worked on Michigan shoreline-property issues for decades, and its members deal directly with the policy questions that emerge during every Great Lakes high water cycle. The 2019 to 2020 high water peak made it clear that property owners and the volunteer organizations supporting them needed better tools for reading current levels in long-term context, comparing across sub-regions, and understanding the regulatory framework at the OHWM.
That need is what produced this site. The dashboard's anchor-year comparator, sub-region structure, and storm-exposure module were each built to answer questions Chris Izworski heard from property owners and from his SOS colleagues. Great Lakes Levels is free to use and carries advertising. Its purpose is to make agency water-level information easier to read for someone whose primary concern is their shoreline.
The project separates several questions that can look similar on a chart. A lake-wide monthly level describes a different scale and time interval from a local station reading. Wind-driven changes can alter the water along one shoreline without establishing a new long-term lake trend. Historical comparisons provide context; they do not by themselves predict the next storm or the next high-water cycle.
The data sources page describes the agency records and the project background explains the interpretation approach. Follow those sources when you need the underlying measurement, station, date, or datum. The site's shoreline and regulatory material is general reference, rather than a property survey or a substitute for an agency determination.
The public repository contains the deployed HTML and compiled assets. Its deployment notes make clear that the original React source is not included. This lets readers distinguish the published site they can inspect from source code that is not available in that repository.
Chris Izworski's professional background is in public-safety operations and emergency communications, including leadership of Bay County 911 and Saginaw County 911. He now works in public-safety technology at Prepared by Axon. His personal profile covers that career; this page focuses on his work creating and maintaining Great Lakes Levels.
Outside of public-safety work, Chris Izworski writes and operates several Michigan-focused public-interest sites. The full work index is at chrisizworski.com/projects. The most actively-maintained sites in the network are listed below.
chrisizworski.com is the personal site, organizing the public-safety work, the AI-deployment material, the press archive, and the broader Great Lakes and Michigan reference content.
Michigan Trout Report tracks live USGS gauge data, water temperature, and weather conditions for sixty-plus Michigan trout streams, including the AuSable, Manistee, Pere Marquette, Muskegon, Boardman, Rifle, and many smaller streams across the Lower and Upper Peninsulas. The site exists for the same reason as Great Lakes Levels: real public-data feeds, surfaced in a form that answers practical questions.
Michigan Birding Report covers live bird-sighting data, county-level birding hotspots, and a personal field journal of Saginaw Bay birding from someone who lives on the bay.
Freighter View Farms is the gardening-and-seed-saving blog written from the same Saginaw Bay vantage as everything else: Zone 6a, lake-effect climate, heritage vegetables, and notes from the garden over the seasons.
Great Lakes Gazette publishes a daily Great Lakes maritime brief covering vessel movements, port reports, NOAA water levels, and NWS marine forecasts, assembled every morning from live AIS and agency feeds.
For media requests, speaking inquiries, or coordination with shoreline-advocacy organizations, the contact path is through chrisizworski.com/media. For SOS-related inquiries, the organization's official channels are the right starting point.