The gauges · USGS water services, read live
The height of the water.
Read off the gauge.
Pick any of 75 notable river gauges across 38 states and the hydrograph draws itself: seven days of discharge as one inked line, stage on a second axis, water temperature where the site reports it — and NOAA’s flood stages ruled across the chart as labelled bands, so a rising river visibly walks up the page toward them.
The readings are the USGS’s own instantaneous values — the same provisional numbers its monitoring network files, at most gauges every fifteen minutes — fetched by this page directly, no key, no account, no server in the middle. Flood stages come live from NOAA’s National Water Prediction Service, per gauge, at the moment you ask.
75 gauges · 38 states · 72 NWS forecast points · USGS instantaneous values · NOAA flood stages · read again every 15 minutes
The gauge
Seven days of one river.
Name a river — or a town, a state, a USGS site id — and take your pick. The chart holds discharge and stage together, rules the flood stages across where NOAA publishes them, and says exactly when it last read the wire. A press of the button reads it again.
Hydrograph
waiting for the wire
Not read yet.
The board
Every gauge. One column of water.
The whole register, ranked by how far each river sits above its own past week — the median of its last seven daily mean discharges, a baseline each gauge carries for itself. A river at +200 per cent is three times its own week; the quiet majority sit within a few per cent of theirs. Click a row and the hydrograph above reads that gauge.
The board
waiting for the wire
Not read yet.
About
Provisional, and it says so.
The readings are the USGS instantaneous-values service — the same numbers on the agency’s own gauge pages, filed by the monitoring network at five- to sixty-minute intervals and usually a quarter of an hour to an hour behind the river itself. The USGS marks nearly all of them provisional, subject to revision, and so does this page: a flood review can move a number after the fact, and a sensor can be wrong before one. The weekly baseline on the board is the median of each gauge’s last seven daily mean discharges, from the same agency’s daily-values service.
The bands are NOAA’s, not ours. For each gauge that is an NWS forecast point — 72 of these 75 — the National Water Prediction Service publishes up to four thresholds on the stage axis: action, where the forecasters start watching; minor flood, nuisance flooding of low ground; moderate, structures and roads begin to flood; major, extensive life-threatening flooding. The hydrograph rules them across the chart exactly as published, and where NWPS publishes no thresholds for a gauge — it carried none for 7 of the 75 when the register was verified on 18 August 2026 — the chart simply draws no bands rather than inventing any.
What the wire does not say, the page does not invent. A gauge that reports no temperature gets no temperature strip; a gauge with no stage sensor gets its flood stages listed as numbers instead of drawn as bands; a batch that will not answer is reported as exactly that. The register itself is fixed and hand-verified — 75 real gauges, every site id fetched and every NWS lid resolved on the day it was built. Your chosen gauge is remembered in this browser and nowhere else, and a link to the page carries the gauge with it.