Lake Eucumbene

Location and Features: Lake Eucumbene is the largest storage lake in the Snowy Mountains Scheme in New South Wales, Australia.

The lake is a reservoir created by the Eucumbene Dam, which is a major gated earth-fill embankment dam. The dam is located around 1 kilometer northeast of the locality of Eucumbene Cove. The dam was constructed with the main purpose of generating hydroelectricity, and it is one of the sixteen major dams that comprise the Snowy Mountains Scheme - a vast hydroelectricity and irrigation complex that was built in southeast Australia between 1949 and 1974. Eucumbene Dam is made up of rock walls, compacted impervious clay, and an earth-fill embankment dam wall made up of approximately 6,735,000 cubic meters of earth and rock-fill, which is 116 meters high and 579 meters long. At 100% capacity, the dam wall has the capacity to hold back 4,798 gigalitres of water, which is approximately nine times the volume of Sydney Harbour. The surface area of Lake Eucumbene is 14,542 hectares and the catchment area is 683 square kilometers. The overflow ski-jump and bucket spillway with two vertical lift gates is capable of discharging 475 cubic meters per second. The two gates, each 6.7 metres wide by 3.9 metres high, were constructed during the years 1977-78 under a separate contract.

Climate: Lake Eucumbene has a cold and wet winter and mild and stormy summers. It experiences a largely uniform rainfall pattern, with the peak occurring in the late winter and spring seasons. Regular fro