The Gainesville area has gotten more than 2 inches of rain over the last week, but Lake Lanier has gone down slightly, possibly because precipitation is falling in the wrong places.

The National Weather Service has recorded 2.19 inches of rain at Lee Gilmer Memorial Airport in Gainesville since June 4. In the past week, the level of Lake Lanier has fallen from 1,064.82 feet to 1,064.77 feet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Full pool is 1,071 feet above sea level.

“Where is the rain falling?” asked E. Patrick Robbins, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Mobile district, which manages reservoirs in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin that includes Lanier. “If it’s not falling at the north end of the lake, it’s not going to have much impact on the level of the lake,” he said. “The bulk of the rain has to fall at the north end of the lake to have much impact. That’s where the drainage basin is.”

“If the rain falls to the east, it drains to the east; if it falls to the west, it drains to the west, but if it doesn’t fall to the north, it’s not going to have much impact,” Robbins said.

Also, he said, because the lake is so large, it takes a lot of rain to raise its level.

“The only thing I could assume is, in a lake that deep, 2 inches (of rain) isn’t going to have much impact,” he said.

The lake did have small upticks after rainfall on June 4 and 5. The level rose to 1,064.82 from 1,064.8 when the area received 0.94 inches of rain on June 4.

It rose again the next day to 1,064.84 after 0.03 inch of rain. Despite getting almost a half inch of rain June 6, the level of the lake fell back to 1,064.82, and fell again to 1,064.81 after just under a tenth of an inch of rain on Thursday.

After receiving 0.68 inch of rain since Sunday, the area faces the return of dry conditions with mostly sunny days and partly cloudy nights in the National Weather Service forecast for the next week.

That could help explain the corps’ prediction that the downward trend for Lanier will continue for the next four weeks. Its website forecasts a level of 1,064.7 for the week of June 22, 1.064.6 for June 29 and 1,064.5 for July 6.

The corps expects a bigger drop, to 1,064.2, for the week of July 13.

Robbins discounted the possibility of releasing water for downstream needs affecting Lanier. The corps’ website shows 24-hour inflows and outflows on Lanier both at 1,388 cubic feet per second.