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Do shallow lakes get rougher than deep lakes?
I live in the Houston, TX area, and all the lakes are so choppy that you can hardly ever ski it seems. I used to live on the west coast, and always boated in deeper lakes, and didn’t seem to always have that problem. The lakes around here all average about 15 to 20ft depth, where the ones I used to boat on could be 100s of feet deep
They certainly do – and frighteningly fast when the wind gets up. As the bottom is close to the surface there is nowhere for the energy of the wind dragging on the surface to go but along. On a deep body of water the energy applied to the water can dissipate into the depths – note that this energy will re-appear when the depth shelves up and the wave’s energy is compressed into a smaller area.
This doesn’t mean that waves don’t form on deep water – far from it. It just means the waves are able to become very very large and slow, like an ocean swell. There can still be smaller waves on top of these, and sometimes smaller ones on them. When the depth shelves from very deep the largest and smaller waves tend to get ‘squashed’ together to form tall unstable waves – think of a surf break. Lots of other stuff comes into play such as currents and wind direction of course.
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