About us

One question

Is my street at risk?

That is the question this site was built to help you answer, and it is a surprisingly hard one to ask of the internet at two in the morning with the rain not stopping. The official numbers exist: the Bureau of Meteorology publishes river heights from hundreds of gauges across Queensland, 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 the handful of gauges that matter to where you live. The site remembers them and puts them in order down the river, and where the Bureau publishes official flood levels for a gauge, it tells you what that gauge’s height means against them. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay, nothing to install.

What it does

Ten gauges, in order, down the river

The site opens on the Brisbane and covers catchments across Queensland. You pick up to ten gauges in one catchment, and they become your river list: upstream at the top, downstream at the bottom, each with its current height, how long ago it was read, and, where the gauge has official flood levels, a colour for what that height means. Open one and you get the last seven days as a chart, that gauge’s minor, moderate and major flood levels if it has them, and, where I have been able to transcribe them, how it compares against past floods.

Alongside that: a map of your chosen gauges, a printable report you can save as a PDF and hand to somebody, and optional flood alerts sent to your browser when a gauge you care about crosses a level you chose. The alerts need no account and no email address either.

If you have not set it up yet, the user guide walks through it in about ten minutes, and explains how to read everything on the screen.

The numbers

Where the heights come from

Every height on this site is a Bureau of Meteorology observation, taken from its Queensland rainfall and river height observations extract (product IDQ65911). I measure nothing myself. The height you see is the one the Bureau published. I do not correct it, smooth it, or fill in a gap in it. Where a gauge has flood levels, they are the Bureau’s own classifications for that gauge and not my estimate of them.

The Bureau publishes that file once an hour, about ten minutes past. I look for a new one every fifteen minutes, keep the raw file before reading it, and publish what it says. So a height here is usually between a quarter of an hour and an hour and a quarter old; assume you are looking at a river up to an hour and a half ago, because 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. A gauge that has not reported for six hours is shown in grey with the time of its last reading. It is never shown as normal, because silence from a gauge is not evidence that the river there is low.

You

What I know about you

Nothing that identifies you, and I would like to keep it that way. 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 me; clear your browsing data and they are gone.

The practical cost of that is worth knowing: 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.

I do use Google Analytics. It is there so I can see which parts of the site are used and where they are failing people, and build a better site with the answer. It stores cookies in your browser and tells Google which pages you opened, roughly what part of the world you are in, and what sort of device you are on. It is not told who you are, I do not join it to anything else, and it has nothing to do with the readings you are shown. A tracker blocker or a private window stops it, and the site works exactly the same without it.

The other outside party is Mapbox, and only on the full map, the one you can pan and zoom: it is drawn by Mapbox, so opening it means your browser talks to them directly, and it takes a press to get there. The small picture on the river screen is fetched through this site instead.

Me

Who makes it

The “us” at the top of this page is one person, and it started as a favour. I live in Tennyson, in Brisbane. My father-in-law’s house is on the Brisbane River, and what he asked me for was a way to see what the gauges upstream of his place were doing, so he would know what was coming down before it reached him.

Anybody who lives on a river knows the reasoning. The water at your back fence tonight was measured somewhere above you this afternoon, and the gauges in between are the warning. What was missing was never the numbers, only the arranging of them: reading them off the Bureau’s own pages meant already knowing which stations to look up, keeping several of them open at once, and holding the order of the river in your head — at the hour of the night when all of that is hardest.

The hard part turned out not to be his stretch of the river. It was the plumbing underneath it: fetching the Bureau’s hourly file, keeping a copy of it, reading it, working out where each gauge sits along its river, and drawing the result. Once that worked for one bend of the Brisbane it worked for every other gauge in the same file, and that file covers the state. So I put the rest of Queensland in as well, and a site built for one stretch of one river now opens on any catchment from the Border Rivers to the Gulf.

River Flood Watch is an independent, non-commercial project. It is not affiliated with the Bureau of Meteorology, with any council, or with any state agency, and none of them endorses it. I simply publish observations they have already made public, and say so on every screen.

There is no company behind it, no advertising on it, and nothing on it is for sale. It is free because the data is free and I cover the running costs. I keep it running in my own time, and I use it myself.

There is one way to reach me, and it is the contact form. It is where to tell me that a height, a flood level or a page here is wrong, and I would far rather hear from you than not.

Free, and no login

No account, no email address, no paywall. Everything on the site is available to everybody, including the alerts.

No account, ever

No sign-up, no email address, no name. Your gauges live in your browser and nowhere else. I do count visits with Google Analytics, which is the one thing on this site that watches you; what I know about you says exactly what it stores.

Somebody else’s numbers, unaltered

Bureau of Meteorology observations, shown as published. Where I hold no official flood levels for a gauge, the page says so rather than colouring it in.

Never the authority

The Bureau, your council and the SES decide what a flood is. This site is a way of watching the river alongside them, not instead of them.

Under it

How it is built

The whole site, the pages you read, the hourly collection of the data, and the alerts, is one small program running on Cloudflare’s network. There is no server room and no team of operators; on a quiet day nothing runs at all except a four-times-an-hour check for a new file.

One detail is worth stating publicly, because it is a promise about the record: the Bureau keeps no back-catalogue of the file I read, and it rotates off their server in about six hours. So every raw pull is archived before it is parsed, because the file worth keeping is the one I could not read, and a separate watchdog raises the alarm if collection goes quiet for ninety minutes. A flood site whose history has holes in it is not much use afterwards, and afterwards is when people come looking.

The source code is open and MIT licensed. The data is not mine to license: river heights and flood classification levels are Bureau of Meteorology material, © Commonwealth of Australia, and where the Bureau licenses them it is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. The Water Regulations 2008 are how the Bureau collects them from the agencies that own the gauges — many of them councils and water authorities rather than the Bureau itself — not the terms on which they are republished. See the full disclaimer for the longer version.

Corrections

Telling me something is wrong

I publish in good faith and I check my work, but a transfer can fail, a page can break and a flood level can be mis-transcribed. If a height here disagrees with the Bureau’s own page for that gauge, trust the Bureau and treat what you see here as broken.

Several things that look like faults are not: the guide’s If something looks wrong section covers the common ones: a river list that has gone entirely grey, a gauge with a height but no colour, a search for a suburb that matches nothing, and a set of chosen gauges that has vanished because the browser data was cleared.

Everything else, tell me on the contact form. A height that disagrees with the Bureau’s own page for the same gauge is the one always worth sending, and naming the gauge and the height you saw saves me a day.