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Access Flood Virtual Gauges

Flood Hub’s virtual gauges are intended for use by experts and hydrologists who need additional and more complex views to improve flood forecasting alerting and response decisions, and/ or organizations that would like to use the flood forecasting tools for evaluation, history analysis, and other research purposes.

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Gauges may include additional information, described below:

Verified / virtual gauges

We’ve expanded Flood Hub’s reach to support hundreds of thousands of verified and virtual locations, where quality assessment was not previously possible. Verified gauges include locations where the quality assessment of the hydrologic model was possible, based on historical streamflow observation or satellite imagery, and yielded high metrics. Virtual gauges include locations where quality assessment was not possible due to the lack of data necessary for evaluation or the evaluation did not produce sufficiently high metrics. Note that in most cases this is the same hydrologic model which is used in verified locations.

Please use the Flood Hub Virtual Gauges Information with caution, you should not use this information as a sole source of data as actual flood conditions may vary.

Additional gauge information

Data source

We use a variety of different sources for the gauge ongoing data. This value indicates where the gauge data is sourced from. Possible sources include Hybas, GRDC, Caravan, etc.

Inundation map when alerting

Inundation is the total water level that occurs on normally dry ground as a result of flooding. This value will show "Yes" if there will be an inundation map available once this station is alerting, "No" indicates that this gauge station will never display an inundation map and Sometimes indicates that an inundation map to this station will appear only if a recent satellite image is available.

Gauge thresholds

Gauge thresholds are calculated either by measuring the river level in meters or measuring the river by its water stream discharge rate in cubic meters per second (cms).

In India, Bangladesh and Brazil, the warning and danger levels are set by the official government agency. In all other locations the "warning level" represents the flooding severity expected in the location once every 2 years, "danger level" represents flooding severity expected once every 5 years, and "extreme level" represents flooding severity expected once in every 20 years.