How high is the river near you right now?

How this works

The Environment Agency runs thousands of gauges across England that report every 15 minutes: river level stations, tipping-bucket rain gauges and coastal tide gauges. The page finds the ones within your chosen radius through the agency’s real-time data API and reads the last 24 hours from the nearest few. Each river gauge is compared with its own typical range, the band the level usually sits in, so “above typical” means unusually high for that spot rather than a fixed height. Flood warnings come from the same service.

For a Scottish postcode the page reads the Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s Time Series Data Service instead: its river and loch level gauges every 15 minutes, with the lowest and highest level on record for the month as the band to compare against and the highest calendar-year level as the record, and its rain gauges by the hour. SEPA has no tide gauges, and its flood warnings are published on Floodline, which the page links to. Wales and Northern Ireland run their own networks, linked from the page for postcodes there.

Sources

• Environment Agency real-time flood-monitoring API (river levels, rainfall, tides, warnings). Open Government Licence v3.
• SEPA Time Series Data Service (Scottish river and loch levels, rainfall). Open Government Licence v3, attribution “SEPA”.
• Postcodes: postcodes.io / ONS Postcode Directory (OGL v3).

This uses Environment Agency flood and river level data from the real-time data API (Beta), and contains SEPA data © Scottish Environment Protection Agency and database right. Neither service guarantees availability, and both publish provisional readings; for anything safety-related use the official Check for flooding service in England or Floodline in Scotland.