The U.S. Geological Survey real time river gauges have been invaluable to those of us who paddle, row, motor, and fish the streams of the United States. But they have been going through a lot of changes in the last few years, a few of them good, most of them (in my opinion) not so good. I've written here before on how to get the most out of them, and in many ways the changes have made getting the most out of them more difficult.
I had worked out a perfect system for efficient gathering of the information I most needed on the old website. I had bookmarked, both on my phone and on my laptop and desktop, a page that had a table of all available gauges for the states I was interested in, grouped by river system. I would go to that page, and it listed the gauges, the links to each gauge, and most importantly, the present discharge in cubic feet per second AND the median discharge for the day. The median is a good approximation of normal. So I could immediately see what any stream in that state I might be interested in was flowing, and how close it was to normal flow. Very often that's all I needed to know; if it was near normal and there hadn't been any significant rain in the last few days, I knew the river was floatable or fishable. And it there had been rain or if the gauge showed levels well above normal, then I could click on the link to that gauge and see exactly what was happening.
So imagine my dismay when, a couple months ago, I clicked on that statewide streamflow table page in my favorites, and the page was GONE. The easiest, simplest, most useful single page in the whole river gauges website, and they dumped it. There was a place to register comments, and I immediately clicked on it and complained. I got a nice response back saying basically nothing, and not acknowledging how stupid it was to get rid of that page.
Instead, there was now a map, showing the counties of the state, with little tiny dots to click on for each gauge. You have to be terrific at geography to know the exact location within a county, or even which county, a given gauge is located. It was basically guessing, clicking, and seeing if the right gauge came up. All that info on present flow and median flow was just gone. One thing the response to my comment did say was that I could put gauges into a "favorites" page. Otherwise, my only choices were to click dots on that map, or scroll down through the list (which in most states is 200 or more gauges) to find the gauge I wanted.
So, I started exploring that "favorites" idea. Well, it turns out to be SLIGHTLY more useful. You can eliminate all the gauges you're NOT interested in within the state. You can make your list of favorites be grouped by river system and not county, which helps considerably to find them. You can even click on one button once you get your favorites page up, and have it show the present levels in feet and discharge in cfs for every gauge in your list. But NO option for it to show the median flow. For that, you have to go to the individual gauge page and click a few more times.
Since I live in both Missouri and Montana part of the year, and also do some floating and fishing in Arkansas, I needed to set up favorites pages for all three. Most people probably wouldn't need to do so; their home state is probably all they are usually wanting to bookmark. And they might not be interested enough in streams on the other side of their state to bother putting them in their favorites list. For them, the favorites list would be fairly simple to use. For me...I started out with 85 gauges in my favorites list for Missouri alone.
So, here is my latest revision on how to use these river gauges. They are still extremely useful, but it's just more difficult to use them. Note: I'm going to attempt to do this using my iPhone, since that is probably what most people usually use, rather than my laptop.
You can start out by doing a Google search for "usgs river gauges (your state)". When I did this for Missouri, the top search result was "USGS Current Water Data for Missouri". I clicked on it, and imagine my surprise when the old beginning page popped up, with a map showing all the gauges, showing the counties, AND showing the streams the gauges were on (though it didn't name the streams, just showed their courses, so you have to be familiar with the statewide drainage patterns to really know that the particular gauge you're interested in is on that particular little squiggly gray line. Here is what the map looks like, zoomed in on my phone so I can click on a gauge if I wish:
You will note that you can barely see those little gray lines showing the rivers, and you'll have to zoom in farther in order to accurately click on some gauges. This may or may not be helpful to you in trying to find a gauge easily. Also note that the colors of the dots are meant to signify whether the stream at that gauge is low, high, or normal
.
I also saw that there is still a spot to click to get to the "statewide streamflow table", but alas, when you click on it, it takes you to this page instead, just as my old bookmarks did:
Scrolling down a bit, you come to this map:
It shows the gauges, but not the streams. I'm familiar enough with the streams of the Ozarks to make a pretty good guess at where each gauge on a fishable river is located, but most people won't be.
So scroll down a bit farther, and you come to this:
This is where you can start building your favorites page. The first thing I did was change the "Group monitoring locations by" to "HUC-06 basin". This will group the gauges by river basin, not county. Now scroll down farther and you will begin to see a list of each gauging station, under the headings of the river basins:
Here you can see boxes to click for each gauge to "Select for My favorites". There is also a box just beneath each river basin heading to select all the gauges in that river basin for your favorites. So I just went down through the list, quickly eliminating whole river basins in northern Missouri which I didn't care about, and clicking on the gauges I wanted to add. Once I got that done, I clicked on "view your favorites page".
Now...your "favorites" page should look like this:
If you scroll down, you'll get to the list of each gauge in your favorites. But there is one more thing you can do to make things a little more helpful. Scroll across the boxes you see in the middle of this page until you see "Graph favorites". Click on it. Then right below the boxes you see "Select a graphing option". Click on "Show selected locations and data types as graphs on a single page". Scroll down and it will show "Step 1 - Select data types to graph" Click on "all" just below that. Scroll all the way down the list of gauges in your favorites that follows until you reach the end of them and get to "Step 2 -View your graphs". Click on "Grouped by location". That takes you to a new page; "My favorite monitoring locations - graphed". It took a long time to get here, but this will show graphs for both height in feet and discharge in cubic feet per second for every gauge in your favorites list...AND in the graphs for discharge, it will show little gray lines for each day that signify the median discharge for that day. As you scroll down, an individual gauge graph for discharge will look like this one:
You can see the dark blue line is the discharge for the last seven days, and the little gray horizontal lines are the medians for each day. So as I type this, the Gasconade near Hazelgreen is flowing 434 cfs after dropping from close to 900 cfs back on May 12. The median ranges between 900 and 1000 cfs. You can also use your finger to slide the little arrow beneath the graph to show the exact discharge at any time during that last seven days. And if you need more information, you can click on "View Monitoring location page" at the top to go to the actual full page for that gauge. You can also scroll back up to the top of the page and change the time graphed from the default 7 days to 2 days, 30 days, or 120 days.
This is the page to bookmark. I'm still trying to decide if it's actually more friendly than just bookmarking your favorites page and then clicking on individual gauges, however; for me, it took a long time to scroll down through the 80 or more gauges I started out with, in order to find the ones I wanted to view. So I figured that I would narrow it down to the streams I actually fish more than once every few years. That still gave me about 40 streams. So I further narrowed it to the streams I know I check all the time. That got it down to 32 in Missouri. Next I went back to step 1 on the My Favorites page, and selected ONLY the "discharge, cubic feet per second" for each gauge. When I scrolled down to step 2 and hit "view graphs grouped by location", it was manageable. Now it appears to be the best option available to somewhat replace my old "Statewide streamflow table" as my starting point when investigating the water conditions on my usual stretches of stream. It tells me the present discharge and the median for the period, but it still takes more time to scroll down through all of them instead of just seeing that info in a table.
I've always said that the USGS river gauges are better than any of the apps you can get, since the apps all use the USGS gauges for their info, and do not offer as much info as the gauge pages themselves do. But given the number of steps it now takes to access all the information I want in the USGS gauges, the question arises whether the apps are now better or easier options.
So I got several free apps onto my phone, and the answer to that, for me, is still no. RiverApp is probably the best of them, but the closest it comes to showing the VERY important information on median (normal) flows is a line on the graph showing the yearly average flow at that gauge. That is NOT good information. And if you pay for the premium, you get MONTHLY average flows. Average flows are NOT median flows. Average flows are skewed upwards by big floods in the past, that are figured into the average. The average flow will always be significantly higher than the median, which is the flow at which 50% of recorded flows for that day are higher, 50% lower. It's a far better approximation of normal flow for the date.
Let me give an example. The upper Jacks Fork in Missouri is a premier float stream that unfortunately is normally too low to float by early June. Right now, in mid-May, the USGS gauge shows the median to be around 220 cfs. But the RiverApp shows the yearly average to be about 270 cfs. So, for this particular time of year, there isn't a whole lot of difference between the yearly average per RiverApp, and the median per the USGS. But...by August, the median flow of the upper Jacks Fork will be around 50 cfs. And RiverApp will still be showing that yearly average of 270 cfs!
So I'm not impressed yet with the apps. At present, my system will be to bookmark the opening page for each state, like that "USGS Current Water Data for Missouri". That gives me that map I can click on for any gauge in the state. Then I've also bookmarked the "My favorite monitoring locations - graphed" for the states I want. That gives me quick access to the discharge graph with median flow shown for the gauges I use all the time. From there, I can click on the link to any individual gauge page to go more in depth on information.
So let's visit an individual gauge page to further explore what you can learn from them. I clicked up the page for the Meramec River near Sullivan; that's the gauge that is most useful for the stretch of the Meramec I fish most often (it's close to my house in Missouri). Back when I was setting up all those pages, there was a spot to click on to make the "Discharge, cubic feet per second" graph the one shown when you open the page; the default is to show the height in feet graph. I'm assuming you may not have found that button, so here is what your opening screen will look like for that gauge:
Gauge height in feet is useful for some things, but for basic info on a stream you are wanting to fish or float, it tells you nothing unless you already KNOW the water conditions that any given height in feet represents. Why? Because height in feet is different for every gauge. It's an arbitrary number. 2.5 feet might be very low on one gauge, and higher than normal on the next gauge downstream. We will get back to when you DO want to use height in feet, but for right now, let's get to discharge in cubic feet per second. You scroll down and you will find a "Graph it" button for "Discharge, cubic feet per second", as shown here:
Click on it you will get the graph for cfs, as shown here:
You will note that the graph also shows the median for each day as the little horizontal gray lines. If it doesn't, there is a place scrolling down to click to get the median. You will also see that arrow and slider right below the graph. You slide the arrow with your finger to get the exact discharge at any time during the period.
You can also see some things to click right below the graph. "Show legend" explains the lines on the graph in case you didn't know. "Show graph details" gives you the exact latest reading on the graph and what time that reading was. "Show today's statistics" is a little more important and interesting. When you click on it, you will get "Statistics for (today's date) based upon (a number) years of data". The number of years is how long the gauge has been recording. The most accurate gauges on things like median flows are those that have been operating the longest. In the case of this gauge, it has been operating for 93 years, so it has a LOT of data to use for its statistics.
Below that are numbers for the "low (a year, in this case 1932), "25th", "median", "75th", "mean", and "high (a year, 2002 in this case)". The low is the lowest discharge ever recorded on this date for this gauge. The high is the highest ever recorded. The mean, as we've mentioned before, is the average of all flows recorded on this date. While interesting, they aren't usually useful. The 25th is the discharge at which only 25% of the flows recorded for the date have been lower. The 75th is the discharge at which 75% have been lower. And the all important median is the flow at which 50% were greater, 50% were less. As a rule of thumb, if the median represents normal, the 75% figure is something close to the maximum flow that will still be floatable and fishable. The 25% figure is the flow where the river here is really getting low.
Scrolling on down on our gauge page, we see a map with the exact location of the gauge marked. This can be very important on an unfamiliar river. For instance, there is a gauge on the Jacks Fork that just says "Jacks Fork at Alley Spring". But the gauge, as zooming in on the map shows, is under the bridge there, which is UPSTREAM from where Alley Spring, a huge spring, enters the river. So that gauge is useless for Alley Spring downstream. It is only useful for the river above the bridge. If you put in at the bridge expecting 150 cfs because that's what the gauge shows, in a quarter mile you will pass Alley Spring and be on more than twice that much water.
In gathering info on any river, you have to first learn where the gauges are and what kind of springs or tributaries are coming into the river in between them. The map shown on the gauge page not only gives you the location of the gauge, if you scroll around on it or zoom out, it will show other gauges on that stream, if any, and you'll also be able to see where tributaries enter the river.
Getting back to our gauge we've been exploring, if you scroll around on the map moving upstream, you'll find that there is a gauge upstream near Steelville, with Huzzah Creek, a major tributary, entering between the two gauges. So it stands to reason that the Steelville gauge should show a lot less water than our Sullivan gauge. You will also see that there is a gauge on Huzzah Creek, which can give you more information on what kind of water is coming downstream, which can be useful if there has been a lot of rain in the area. There is also a gauge close to the headwaters at Cook Station; another source of info on what you can expect in the next day or so.
While we're talking about possible high water coming down the river, let's get back to that graph for height in feet that you may have gotten in the beginning, and can go to by clicking on the button for "graph it" "Gage height, feet":
Before I go on, I just want to mention that the USGS uses the spelling of "gage". I used to use it as well when I was writing about the gauges, but got too many people complaining that I didn't know how to spell. So I've started using "gauge" instead.
While the discharge in cubic feet per second is a universal measure for any gauge, it is often hard to picture what a rise in the river looks like in cfs. You don't know whether an increase of 500 cfs is a huge rise or barely a blip. But most people can picture a rise of 2 feet. If you look at the graph, you'll see that on May 13 the river jumped abruptly as heavy rain hit the area. But the graph shows the rise was only about 0.7 feet. As a rule of thumb, you can figure that if the river has been stable and not high, a rise of less than a foot means it hasn't changed much and will still be floatable and fishable. 1-2 feet is a more significant rise; the river will still be floatable and may be clear enough to fish, but the current will be moving you downstream in a hurry and you'd better be on your toes. 2-3 feet means it's for the very experienced only, and probably too muddy to fish. Over 3 feet...stay off it. You might find it easier to paddle, but the consequences of mistakes can be severe or deadly.
So height in feet is useful for judging how significant a rise in the river is. That is about all it tells you as far as the floatability and fishability of the river.
There is one other bit of often useful information you can still get from the gauge, but I don't know how much longer it will last, and I've been unable to find it on the new pages themselves. If you scroll back to the top of our gauge page we've been discussing, you'll find a link to "Legacy real time page". Clicking it will take you back to the format of the old pages after a blurb saying that the page is going to be discontinued at some point. Scroll down a bit and you'll find this to click on:
See that "Current stage-discharge rating"? Click on it and it will give you a table that looks like this:
This takes a bit of explanation. Any gauge does measures ONLY height in feet. That is the raw measurement. To convert height in feet into discharge in cubic feet per second, actual people have gone to the gauge site at different water levels, and physically measured the flow in cubic feet per second, and they periodically go back and remeasure it. Thus they come up with a table that matches different heights in feet to the flow in cubic feet per second. Those three columns on this page show that table. The column on the left is a given height in feet. The column on the right is its corresponding discharge in cfs. The middle column doesn't matter for out purposes. So if somebody tells you that a month ago the height in feet on the gauge of the river they fished was 2.3 feet, but they didn't check the discharge in cfs, you can go to this table and see what the river is flowing in cfs at a height of 2.3 feet.
In conclusion, I hope this helps you to understand the new gauge format, and how to find the most useful features. There is a wealth of information in these gauges that most people don't know how to find or use. They could be made easier and more user friendly, but once you learn to use them, they are better than any of the apps.
