River Levels in Every State

Pick your state below: each state page reads its USGS gauges live and puts every stage next to the NWS flood stage for that gauge, or use the ZIP tool on this page to find the gauges nearest you across all 300 on the site. For rivers beyond these, USGS Water Data for the Nation maps every active gauge in the country and the NWS National Water Prediction Service adds flood stages and forecast crests. Those two agency sites are the source of everything here.

NWS's own definition: "An established gage height for a given location above which a rise in water surface level begins to create a hazard to lives, property, or commerce. The issuance of flood (or in some cases flash flood) warnings is linked to flood stage. Not necessarily the same as bankfull stage." The key point is that it is set per gauge: 12 feet is a flood on one river and a dry summer on another, which is why every reading on these pages is compared only against its own gauge's thresholds and never against a national number.

Both are NWS products with precise meanings. A Flood Watch is "issued to inform the public and cooperating agencies that current and developing hydrometeorological conditions are such that there is a threat of flooding, but the occurrence is neither certain nor imminent". A Flood Warning is "a release by the NWS to inform the public of flooding along larger streams in which there is a serious threat to life or property". Flash Flood Warnings are the urgent case: flash flooding in progress, imminent, or highly likely. The state pages list whichever of these is active right now.

Because the thresholds describe impacts, not water. NWS: "Flood categories are terms defined for each gage location that describe or categorize the observed or expected severity of flood impacts in the corresponding stream segment or nearby stream. The severity of flooding at a given stage is not necessarily the same at all locations along a stream due to varying channel/bank characteristics on portions of the stream." A reach with a floodwall tolerates stages that would inundate an unprotected reach of the same river, so each forecast point gets its own ladder of action, minor, moderate and major stages.

No, and these pages will not pretend otherwise. A gauge is an index for its reach: NWS advises people near any stream to identify the closest gauge as an index for expected water level changes at their location, and that is exactly what it is, an index. Property level flood determinations are FEMA's alone, through the Flood Map Service Center at msc.fema.gov, and this site links that rather than imitating it. And no gauge helps with flash flooding on ungauged creeks, which is what the NWS warning feed is for.

No, and it never will. NWS already establishes the action, minor, moderate and major thresholds that emergency managers actually use, USGS already publishes the readings, and FEMA already owns flood zone determinations. Every number on these pages is an agency number with attribution; the only arithmetic of ours is the subtraction between a live stage and a published threshold, and it is labelled as exactly that.

Because moving water on roads is the killer, not river crests. NWS's flood safety material is blunt about it: "Each year, more deaths occur due to flooding than from any other thunderstorm related hazard. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that over half of all flood-related drownings occur when a vehicle is driven into hazardous flood water. The next highest percentage of flood-related deaths is due to walking into or near flood waters." That is why every page in this vertical carries the depth numbers and the instruction that goes with them, and why the flash flood alerts matter more than any gauge for small streams.