This is a community service and not an official warning service. In an emergency call 000; for storm and flood assistance call the SES on 132 500. If what this site shows disagrees with the Bureau of Meteorology, your council or your state emergency service, they are right and we are wrong. Read the full disclaimer.
One question
Is my street at risk?
That is a surprisingly hard question to ask of the internet at two in the morning with the rain not stopping. The official numbers exist: the Bureau publishes river heights from hundreds of Queensland gauges, every hour, for free. But they arrive as a wall of stations you have to already know the names of, and they do not stay on your screen from one night to the next.
River Flood Watch is those same numbers, arranged for one person watching one river. You choose your gauges once. The site remembers them and puts them in order down the river, and where the Bureau publishes official flood levels for a gauge, it shows you what that gauge’s height means against them.
What you get
Set it up once, on a calm day
Picking your gauges takes a couple of minutes and never has to be done again on that device. After that, opening the site is one press and one glance.
Your river list
Up to ten gauges in one catchment, upstream at the top and downstream at the bottom, each with its height, how long ago it was read, and, where the gauge has official flood levels, a colour for what that height means.
One gauge, in detail
The last five days as a chart, the gauge’s minor, moderate and major flood levels if it has them, and, where we have them, how today compares against past floods.
Alerts, if you want them
Your browser can notify you when a gauge you follow crosses a level you chose. No account and no email address: the alert is arranged with your browser, not with us.
A map and a printed sheet
Your gauges on a map you can pan and zoom, and a one-page report you can save as a PDF and hand to somebody who is not going to be looking at a phone.
The numbers
Whose heights these are
Every height on this site is a Bureau of Meteorology observation. We measure nothing ourselves, and we do not correct, smooth or fill in what the Bureau published. Where a gauge has flood levels, they are the Bureau’s own classifications for that gauge and not our estimate of them.
The Bureau classifies minor, moderate and major heights for some of its gauges and not others, and most of the gauges here do not have them; roughly a third do. A gauge without them shows its height and says so plainly rather than guessing at what the number means, so it never appears as though the river there is safe. A rising river at a gauge with no flood levels is still a rising river.
The Bureau publishes once an hour and we look for a new file every fifteen minutes, so assume you are looking at a river up to an hour and a half ago. On a fast-rising creek that is a great deal of water. Gauges also go quiet, most often in exactly the weather this site exists for; one that has stopped reporting is shown in grey with the time of its last reading, never as normal.
You
What we know about you
Nothing that identifies you. There is no account, no sign-up and no email address. The gauges you choose and the river you last looked at are stored in your own browser, on your own device, and are never sent to us.
We do count visits, with Google Analytics, so we can see which parts of the site are used and make it better. It sets two cookies and is the only thing here that watches you. It never learns who you are, and it never sees which gauges you follow, because those never leave your device. The cookie policy says exactly what it holds and how to switch it off.
The practical cost is worth knowing before you start: because your list lives in the browser you made it in, it does not travel between devices. Each phone, tablet and computer needs setting up on its own.
Start here
Open the river
The site opens on the Brisbane and covers catchments across Queensland. Change it to yours, pick your gauges, and it will be waiting the next time it rains.