River Levels and Flood Classes
Official gauges from France, Germany and the United States.
Official river levels and flood classes near you: France, Germany and the United States, with the reading, its time and the scale that applies.
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All Weather & environment tools →The river at the bottom of the garden has risen, and you want a number rather than an impression. Pick your place: the page lists the official gauges within thirty kilometres, each with its latest reading, the time it was taken, and — where a service publishes one — the official flood level that goes with it. What it will not do is invent the missing half. In Germany the measurement and the flood class come from two different services and neither replaces the other, so a gauge shows the one it has and says the other is absent. In France the reading comes from Hub'Eau and the vigilance colour from Vigicrues; in the United States the National Water Prediction Service publishes both together. Elsewhere, the page says plainly that no service is read rather than showing an empty list that would look like calm water.
How to use it
- In “Country”, keep the suggested country or pick another, then type the first letters of your town in “Town or city” and click the right line; “Use my location” takes your position instead, rounded in your browser before anything is sent.
- The gauges come sorted by distance, nearest first. Each line carries the river, how far away it is, and the reading in large type on the right — metres in Europe, feet in the United States, because that is the unit each service publishes and its own thresholds use.
- Read the line under each gauge: it says whether an official level goes with the reading, or that the service publishes none. A German gauge with a class and no number, and one with a number and no class, are both normal — and the page says which you are looking at.
- Open the second tab to see the scale that applies where you are: four vigilance levels in France with their official wording, six flood classes in Germany, five threshold categories in the United States. The three scales are national and are never mixed in one column.
- When nothing is listed, read the sentence above the list before concluding anything: it says whether a service was read and found no gauge within thirty kilometres, or whether no service is read for this country at all.
Five services, and why it takes five
France splits the work in two. Hub'Eau holds the measurements of 6,473 gauging stations, overseas départements included, refreshed every five minutes, and it is the only one of the five that answers directly for a point and a radius. Vigicrues holds the vigilance colour and the forecast, on 341 river reaches of which 337 were being published on the day this page was built. Germany splits it too, but differently: PEGELONLINE measures 787 federal stations on 103 waterways every fifteen minutes, and the flood portal of the Länder classes 1,572 gauges without measuring any of them. The United States is the exception where one service, the National Water Prediction Service, publishes the reading, the forecast and the flood thresholds in the same response.
Units are converted here, and the conversions matter more than they look. Hub'Eau publishes heights in millimetres and flows in litres per second, where Vigicrues publishes metres: a reading of 427 is 0.427 m, and adding the two together without converting would show a river forty-two centimetres deep as four hundred and twenty-seven metres. PEGELONLINE publishes centimetres above the gauge zero, which is a local reference and not an altitude — at Cologne that zero sits 35.038 m above sea level. The American service mixes thousands of cubic feet per second in one field with plain cubic feet per second in the next; the factor of a thousand is applied before anything is compared.
When a number beats an impression
- Watching a rise overnight: the gauge upstream tells you what is coming down before it arrives, and the time on the reading tells you how old that news is.
- Planning a paddle, a swim or a bank-side walk, where the useful figure is the level now and not the weather forecast for tomorrow.
- Checking on a house or a field in another country, in a language you don't read: the level and the class are in yours, and the gauge links back to the service's own page.
- Settling an argument about how high it got: the reading carries its own timestamp, and the service's page carries the history behind it.
What the services actually publish
On 16 September 2026, the gauge at Cologne on the Rhine read 74 centimetres above its zero, taken at 09:15 local time and read twelve minutes later — the cadence is one reading every quarter of an hour. The same station also publishes water temperature, in degrees, from the same endpoint: reading the first series that comes back would have shown a temperature where a river level belongs. At Toulouse, Hub'Eau answered for a twenty-kilometre radius with twenty-two stations, and the nearest one's latest height came back as the integer 427, nine minutes old, flagged by its own producer as raw and unvalidated.
The same day, the whole of metropolitan France was green: all 337 published reaches sat at level 1 of the four-level scale. That is worth knowing when reading this page in a calm week — an all-green map is the normal state, not a sign that something failed. In the United States, of 12,884 gauges listed nationally, about 7,257 carry a usable flood category; the rest have no thresholds defined, or are out of service, or their last reading is too old to mean anything. Those are the ones this page leaves without a level rather than colouring them green.
What this page cannot tell you
- There is no alert threshold in Germany. No official service publishes the Länder's numeric alert marks through an interface a page can read, so a German gauge shows its height and its class and stops there. The figures that look like thresholds in the federal data are a long-term average of high waters and a limit for shipping — neither is a warning level.
- Thirty kilometres is a radius, not a catchment. The nearest gauge may sit on another river entirely, and a small stream behind the house may have no gauge at all — France alone has 6,473 stations for a country of countless watercourses. The river's name is printed on every line so you can tell.
- Real-time readings are raw. The French service marks them unvalidated as it publishes them, and says so on the page; a value can be corrected later, and a sensor can drift or fail. The page shows what the producer published, with the producer's own caveat.
- It is not a warning service and never notifies anyone. Nothing is pushed, nothing rings. For an official warning on your phone, go to the service that issues it; each gauge here links back to its own.
Privacy
Processed on a serverThe place you choose goes to our server rounded to a hundredth of a degree, about 1 km, together with its country code; your position is asked for only when you click “Use my location”, rounded in your browser and never kept. Depending on that country, our server asks Hub'Eau and Vigicrues, PEGELONLINE and the Länder flood portal (hochwasserzentralen.de), or the National Water Prediction Service: each of them sees our server's address, never yours. The last town you picked stays in your browser's local storage (allin_tools), shared with the weather pages. To prevent abuse, a counter keeps a fingerprint derived from your IP address rather than the address itself. The delivery network keeps a reading for a few minutes at most — two in France, one in Germany, five in the United States — and nothing is logged. Usage measurement records that readings were shown or that a reading failed, never the place.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a German gauge show a level but no number?
Because in Germany the two come from two different services, and their lists of gauges only partly overlap. The flood portal of the Länder classes 1,572 gauges without measuring any of them; the federal service measures 787 stations without classing any. A gauge known to one and not the other therefore has one half and not the other. Filling the gap by guessing — colouring a measured gauge green because the water looks low — would be inventing an official statement nobody made.
The reading says 0.43 m. Is that the depth of the river?
No. It is a height above that gauge's own zero — a local reference point fixed once and written into the station's record, not the riverbed and not sea level. Two gauges on the same river can therefore read very different numbers while the water is at the same height. What the figure is good for is comparison with itself: yesterday, this morning, an hour ago. For German gauges the page says so under the reading.
How old is the reading?
Of minutes, and the exact time sits under each gauge. The French service updates every five minutes and was nine minutes behind when measured; the German federal service produces one reading every fifteen minutes and was twelve minutes behind; the American one was twenty-eight. A reading is reused for two minutes in France, one in Germany and five in the United States before it is fetched again, and a tab left open refreshes on the same rhythm while you are looking at it.
Nothing is listed near me. Is the river low?
It says nothing about the water. Either a service was read and found no official gauge within thirty kilometres — common away from the main rivers — or no service is read for that country at all, in which case go to your national water service. The sentence above the list tells you which of the two, because letting them look alike is the one mistake a page about rivers must not make.
Is there a forecast?
Two of the three countries publish one, and not for every gauge. France publishes a forecast for its vigilance stations, in three tendencies whose official reading is that the low one has nine chances in ten of being exceeded, the middle one five and the high one one. The United States publishes a forecast with every gauge that has one. Germany publishes none through these services. Where a forecast exists it belongs to the service that made it, and the link on each gauge leads to it.
Why is there no map?
Because the one that would fit is not ours to reuse. The French vigilance map is drawn on a national mapping base whose terms forbid copying and reproduction, and the river outlines that carry the colour are only half of it. Rather than redraw something approximate, the page gives the gauges themselves, the distance to each and a link to the service's own map, which is the authority anyway.
Does my position leave my browser?
Only rounded, and only if you ask for it. Clicking “Use my location” rounds your coordinates to a hundredth of a degree in the browser, about a kilometre, before our server ever sees them, and that rounded point is never stored. Our server passes it on as a search radius or a bounding box; the water services see our server and the rounded area, never your address.