Reading the river

Part one · Set up

Before you start

River Flood Watch shows the current water height at river gauges across Queensland, listed in the order the water flows past them, so you can answer one question quickly: is my street at risk?

One word turns up on nearly every screen, so it is worth ten seconds now: a catchment is one river system, meaning the main river and all the creeks that drain into it. Brisbane is a catchment. Mary is another. The site shows you one at a time, because upstream and downstream only mean something within one system.

Three things are worth knowing before you rely on it.

The readings are the Bureau's, and they arrive hourly

Every height on this site came from the Bureau of Meteorology. They publish a fresh set of readings about once an hour, and this site picks it up within about fifteen minutes. Nothing here is measured by us, and nothing is smoothed, corrected or predicted: what you see is what the gauge sent.

Under the flood levels on every gauge page is the line Heights and flood levels supplied by the Bureau of Meteorology. The Bureau's name is a link. On most gauges it opens the Bureau's own chart for that same gauge, so you can check our number against theirs in one click. On the rest it opens the Bureau's home page instead — those are mostly tide gauges and smaller sites the Bureau does not publish a flood chart for.

There is no account, so nothing follows you between devices

There is no sign-up, no email address and no password. The gauges you choose are written into the browser you chose them in, and they never leave it: nothing is sent to us, and there is nothing on our side to sync.

It is stored per browser rather than per device, so one laptop running both Chrome and Firefox keeps two separate lists. Three other things will empty a list you have already made:

• Clearing your browsing data. Anything that clears cookies and site data for this site clears your gauges along with them.
• A private or incognito window. It forgets the moment you close it, every time.
• A browser that refuses storage. Some privacy settings block it outright. The site still works and you can still choose gauges for that visit; it simply will not remember them next time you come back.

It is not a warning service

That sentence sits at the bottom of every screen. The long version says what this site can and cannot tell you, and who to follow instead in an emergency. It is worth five minutes before you rely on any of this: read the full disclaimer.

Part one · Set up

Set it up in ten minutes

Out of the box the site shows a default set of gauges down the Brisbane River. That is a reasonable starting point and a poor finishing point: the whole value of the site comes from watching the water that actually reaches you.

1. Open the site and find the Choose gauges button. It sits in the panel just under the site's name, beside See these on a map, Save as PDF and Flood cameras. Press it.
2. Work out which water reaches you, before you touch the list. Which river or creek runs through your area, and which way does it flow? A map will answer both in a minute: search your suburb in Google Maps and follow the blue line, or open your council's flood map. This site cannot tell you this, and it is the one thing you need before the rest is useful.
3. Get the Bureau's station numbers for that water. Google, or an AI assistant, will do this legwork if you ask it plainly: "which Bureau of Meteorology river height stations should I watch for flooding at [your suburb], and what are their station numbers?" Ask for the station numbers specifically. They are the Bureau's own ID numbers, they look like 540198, and the search box on the next screen takes them, so each one goes straight to its gauge with no hunting through headings.
4. Check what you were told, before you trust it. Find the stations it named on the map, and make sure they really are on your water and really are upstream of you. These tools give confidently wrong answers, and a wrong answer about which gauge covers you is worse than no answer at all. If a station number finds nothing here, the number is not bad: it means this site does not publish that station yet, and the Bureau's own site will still have it.
5. Narrow to your catchment. If the Catchment dropdown is showing, set it to your river system. If it is not showing, everything the site publishes is already in one catchment and there is nothing to narrow.
6. Work down the headings to find your gauges. The list is grouped by river and creek, and within each group it runs upstream to downstream, so find the heading for your water, then read down it to the gauge nearest you. Tick that one, then the ones above it. See Which gauges to choose, which is the part people skip and the part that gives you warning time.
7. Press ‹ Back to my gauges. Your list is now on the front page, in river order, and it will be there next time you open the site on this device.
8. Put it on your home screen. You get an icon that opens straight to your river, with no browser to get through first. The one time you will want this site is the one time you will not want to be searching for it. See Put it on your home screen. On an iPhone, it is worth doing before you choose your gauges rather than after.
9. Now do it again on your other devices. Your choices live in the browser you made them in and do not travel, so your phone, your tablet and each computer you use need setting up separately. See There is no account.

Part one · Set up

Put it on your home screen

You do not have to open a browser and go looking for this site every time. Every phone, tablet and computer can put River Flood Watch on the home screen as its own icon, and pressing that icon opens it the way an app opens: full screen, no address bar, straight to your river. It is still the same website underneath, so there is nothing to install from an app store and nothing to keep updated.

It takes about twenty seconds.

On an iPhone or iPad

Safari, Chrome, Edge and Firefox can all do this. If you want flood alerts as well, use Safari, for the reason in the note further down.

1. Open the site and go to the river page, the one with your gauge list on it.
2. Press the Share button. It is the square with an arrow coming out of the top. In Safari it is along the bottom of the screen on an iPhone, and in the top-right corner on an iPad. In Chrome and Edge it is up beside the address bar, and in Firefox it is behind the menu button.
3. Scroll down that list to Add to Home Screen, press it, then press Add.

On an Android phone or tablet

Chrome, Edge, Samsung Internet, Firefox and Opera can all do this. Only the wording of the menu item really changes.

1. Open the site in your browser.
2. Press the three dots in the corner to open the menu. In Samsung Internet it is three lines at the bottom instead.
3. Press Add to Home screen, then Install. Some browsers offer this by themselves in a bar across the bottom of the screen; that bar does the same thing.

On a computer

In Chrome or Edge, look at the right-hand end of the address bar for a small install icon, a little screen with an arrow pointing into it. Press it, then confirm. If it is not showing, the same thing lives in the browser's menu: Cast, save and share then Install page as app in Chrome, or Apps then Install this site as an app in Edge. Safari on a Mac calls it Add to Dock, in the File menu. Firefox does not offer this at all; on Firefox, a bookmark is as far as you can go.

What changes once it is installed

• It opens on the river, not the front page. The icon takes you straight to your gauge list. If you have installed it, you already know what the site is, so it does not show you the page that explains that.
• It gets its own window. No address bar and no tabs, and on a phone it shows up alongside your other apps when you switch between them.
• Nothing else is different. Same pages, same readings, same hourly updates, same limit of ten gauges. Every address in Links you can send someone still works, and a link that leaves the site opens in your normal browser.

To remove it, treat the icon like any other app: press and hold it and delete it on a phone, or uninstall it from the browser's menu on a computer. The website itself is untouched and still there in your browser. On an iPhone, though, deleting the icon throws away the separate settings behind it, so the gauges and the alerts you set up inside the app go with it.

Part one · Set up

Choosing your gauges

The Choose gauges button opens a screen headed Choose your gauges. It lists every gauge the site publishes, grouped first by catchment and then by the river or creek each gauge stands on, so the headings answer "which of these is my river" before you have read a single station name. The Brisbane River sits at the top of its group; everything else is alphabetical.

What each row tells you

Each river and creek is a card, with its name across the top, and a row inside it is a tick box carrying four things:

• the gauge name, as the Bureau names it;
• the suburb under it, with the river or creek where that is not already the heading above;
• the station number, in its own column on the right. It is the Bureau's own ID and the thing to quote if you are checking against their site;
• when it was last updated, in the last column, as an age: updated 12 minutes ago, updated 3 days ago, or no data yet for a station that has been switched on but has never reported.

Those last two are columns so that a screenful of gauges can be compared down the page rather than read one at a time. On a narrow phone they fold back underneath the name.

Some rows also carry a provisional levels flag. That is important and is explained under Flood levels.

The tools at the top

Search. One box. It looks at a gauge's station number, its name, its suburb, the river or creek it stands on, and its catchment, all at the same time. So Bremer finds that whole river and 540198 finds exactly one gauge. Even part of a number helps, because the Bureau numbers its stations by river system, so gauges on the same water start with the same few digits.

Catchment. A dropdown that cuts the list down to one river system. It only appears when the site publishes more than one. It works together with the search, so you can narrow to your catchment first and then search inside it.

Alongside those are up to two filter buttons. They are buttons rather than tick boxes: press one and it fills in dark with a tick to show it is on, press it again to turn it off. Neither one is on to begin with.

Only my 9 chosen. Hides everything you have not already picked. It is the quickest way to see what is actually on your river list, instead of scrolling several hundred rows hunting for the ticks. It works with the search and the catchment dropdown too, so you can look at just the gauges you have chosen on one creek. It only appears once you have chosen something, and while it is on, the other filter is put away, because everything on screen is already yours.

If you untick a gauge while this filter is on, the row stays where it is, unticked, rather than vanishing from under your finger. So a mistap is one tap to undo. Turn the filter off and on again to let those rows go.

Hide 412 with no reading in 5 days. The number changes; it is however many gauges have gone properly silent. There are plenty of them, because a station can be listed and set up and still not be sending anything. When you only have ten places on your list, a gauge that has produced nothing since March is not worth one of them. Two things this filter will never do: it never hides a gauge you have already chosen, and if it would empty the list completely, it says so and offers to show them anyway.

The limit is ten per catchment

The counter above the title reads 3 of 10 chosen, or, once you follow gauges in more than one river system, 3 chosen across 2 catchments — up to 10 in each. Ten is deliberate: it is about as many rows as fit on a phone screen without the list becoming something you scroll rather than something you scan.

The limit is per catchment, not overall. Filling the Brisbane costs you nothing on the Mary. When a catchment is full, its unticked boxes go grey, the counter adds — untick one to make room for another, and every river card in that catchment carries Untick one for another beside its name — because on a phone the catchment heading is long gone off the top of the screen by the time you reach the row whose box will not tick. Boxes in other catchments are unaffected.

Starting over

Clear all gauges unticks everything in one press, which saves hunting your ticked rows back out of a list of hundreds. It leaves you with an empty list, and an empty list is a decision the site keeps: the river page says you have not chosen any gauges rather than quietly refilling itself with the default set, and it is still empty when you come back tomorrow. To start again, tick the gauges you want. The button appears only while you have something to clear.

Part one · Set up

Which gauges to choose

Most people tick the gauge nearest their house and stop. That gauge tells you what is happening now; it gives you no warning at all. A useful list has three kinds of gauge on it.

1. The gauge nearest you

The closest gauge on the water that runs past you. This is the one whose flood levels actually describe your streets. It may well be named after a suburb that is not yours, because a gauge is named for the spot the instrument stands in, and there are far more suburbs than gauges. What matters is that it is on your river or creek and near you, not what it is called.

2. Two or three gauges upstream

This is where your warning time comes from. Water that is at a gauge 40 km upstream this morning is your problem this afternoon. Pick them at a spread of distances rather than clustered (one close, one middling, one well up the catchment), so you can see the shape of what is coming, not just that something is.

3. The creek or river that joins yours

Rivers are not single lines. Other creeks and rivers run into them, and each one brings its own water. If you are in Ipswich, your flood is decided by the Bremer, which is not on the Brisbane River at all, and what the Bremer does today is often what the Brisbane does tomorrow. Find the creek or river that joins yours upstream of you, and put a gauge on it.

One last thing about those: a creek that joins your river is nearly always in the same catchment as the river it joins. The Bremer sits inside BRISBANE, so it uses one of your ten Brisbane places and turns up on the same list. That is exactly what somebody in Ipswich wants, because the two have to be read together.

Part two · Read the river

Reading the river list

The front page is your gauges, listed in river order — upstream at the top, downstream at the bottom. Read it in this order.

The verdict at the top

Above the list are three things that are all counted from the same gauges, so they can never disagree with each other: a headline, a paragraph, and a row of small counts.

The headline is one line about your gauges, not the whole catchment. It names the worst-off river and, where we can tell, which way it is going:

• Bremer River is above minor flood level.
• Lockyer Creek is above moderate and still rising.
• Levels are rising, but still below minor flood level.
• Every gauge is low and steady.
• No gauge is reporting a reading right now.

If you read nothing else on the page, read this. It is written so that silence is never reported as calm. And still rising is only ever added when there are enough recent readings on that gauge to say so; when there are not, the sentence is simply the shorter one.

The paragraph under it fills in the rest of the list, worst first: Bremer River is above minor. 2 gauges are close to their minor level. Moggill is not reporting. The gauges in trouble are named; the ones that are merely close to a level, or below it, are counted rather than listed.

The counts are a row of small labels, each a colour, a number and the state in words — 2 minor flooding, 5 below minor, 1 not reporting. Read with the colour removed they still say the same thing. The wording close to minor is used rather than "watch", because that band is ours and not the Bureau's.

The card underneath it

Everything on that card is about the list rather than on it: the catchment dropdown (only shown if you follow gauges in more than one), the four buttons — See these on a map, Save as PDF, Flood cameras and Choose gauges — and a line reading something like 10 gauges · Updated 3:15 pm · next check at 3:30 pm. The four buttons are only there while you have gauges to use them on.

Guide and Alerts sit above that card, in the top-right corner. Those two are about the whole site rather than about this river, which is why they are not in with the other four.

Check that update time. It is when the readings on screen were published. Next check at is when we next go looking, which we do four times an hour. Most of those checks find nothing new — the Bureau publishes about once an hour — so it is normal for the update time to stay put while the checking time keeps moving. What it tells you is that the site is still looking.

A gauge row

Illustration only: this height and this shape are invented. Four things, left to right: the band the gauge is in, its name and where it is, the shape of the last day, and the height with which way it is going.

The four parts of a row

• The bar down the left is the band that gauge is in, in that band's colour: green for below minor, through to dark red for major. It is a colour, not a level indicator — it does not fill up as the river rises. How far through the band the water is lives on the gauge's own page, on the flood ladder.
• The name and the line under it. The suburb, and either how far upstream the gauge is or which river or creek it stands on.
• The small shape is the last 24 hours of that gauge's readings, drawn only when its reading is current. It has no numbers on it on purpose: it is there to show a rise or a fall at a glance, and the gauge's own page has the chart with a scale.
• The height, with a word under it: rising fast, rising, steady, easing, or no trend. It compares the newest reading with one about three hours before it. No trend means there are not enough recent readings to say which way the river is going — it does not mean steady.

Two rows in the same colour are not necessarily in similar trouble, and two rows showing the same number of metres almost certainly are not: every gauge has its own flood levels and its own zero point. Never compare the numbers between rows. See Datum.

Tap or click any row to open that gauge in full.

Switching catchments

The list shows one catchment at a time, and there is no "show me everything" option. That is on purpose. Upstream and downstream only mean something within one river system, so mixing two together would give you a list in no useful order at all. If you follow gauges in more than one, use the Catchment dropdown. The page remembers where you were, so next time you open the site you get the river you were last reading.

Part two · Read the river

Colour, status and what each band means

Colour on this site carries flood status and nothing else. Every colour is also stated in words next to it, so nothing depends on your being able to tell orange from red.

Minor, moderate and major are the Bureau's own published classifications for that specific gauge, and the descriptions above are condensed from the Bureau's own definitions of the three bands.

Part two · Read the river

When a gauge stops reporting

Sensors go quiet. It happens on ordinary days and it happens during floods, and the site is careful to distinguish two very different kinds of silence.

One gauge has gone quiet

The row turns grey, the height is replaced by a dash, and a line appears saying No reading since 4:00 am · last 12.40 m.

Read that carefully. The last height is quoted because it is still the best information anyone has about that stretch of river, but it is history, and the site will not print it where a current reading goes. A grey row with an empty bar is not a low river.

A gauge counts as quiet after six hours without a reading. Note that some Bureau stations only transmit when the level changes, so a few hours of silence on a flat afternoon is normal rather than a fault.

The whole page has stopped updating

A separate notice appears above the readings: These readings may be out of date. It tells you when the last update arrived and how long ago that was.

This one is about the site's own data supply, not about any gauge. It appears when no new data has arrived for 90 minutes: long enough to tolerate one missed hourly file, short enough that you are told before two hours of river have gone unnoticed. The readings stay on screen underneath it, because an hour-old river is worth far more than an apology.

If you see it, go to the Bureau of Meteorology for the official heights.

Part three · Read one gauge

One gauge in detail

Tapping a row opens that gauge in full. On a phone it replaces the list: ‹ All gauges gets you back, as does the phone's own back gesture. On a wide screen it sits beside the list.

The pane has six parts, top to bottom.

The reading

The gauge's name, a large number in metres, and a status chip that says the band in words: At minor flood level, Approaching minor flood level, and so on. If the gauge is offline, the large number is a dash rather than a stale height, and the chip says No current reading. The last height it sent is in the paragraph below, in the past tense, with the time.

The flood ladder

Directly under the number is a bar showing that number against the levels that give it meaning. The bar is divided into the gauge's own bands — BELOW MINOR, MINOR, MODERATE and MAJOR — each labelled with the heights it covers, and a mark labelled now sits where today's reading falls. That is where you see how far through a band the water is, which the colour on the river list deliberately does not tell you.

Two lines appear under the bar when they apply, because the picture cannot say them:

• The reading is below this gauge's zero, so the marker is at the end of the bar rather than at the height. Real, and normal on a tidal gauge at low water.
• The scale runs past major flood level to fit this reading. The river is above major, so the bar has been stretched to get the marker on it. Read the numbers on the bands rather than the width of them.

Where the site holds no usable flood levels, there are no bands to draw. The bar becomes one plain strip labelled NO FLOOD LEVELS HELD or LEVELS PUBLISHED, NOT APPLIED HERE, and nothing may be read from where the marker sits on it. The panel at the bottom of the pane says which case you are in — see Flood levels.

The paragraph

One short paragraph turning the number into something you can act on. For a river below minor flooding it tells you how much further the water would have to climb; for one at or above minor it tells you to check council advice and not to drive through water; for a silent gauge it says when it went quiet and what it last read.

The chart

The last seven days of this gauge's own heights. It gets its own section below; it is one of the two parts of this screen people most often misread.

Flood cameras near here

Between the chart and the flood levels, and only when there is a road camera within 3 km of this gauge. It is a heading, Flood cameras near here, and one button under it: 1 flood camera near here, with Nearest is 850 m away, at Karana Downs on the line below and a › at the end. Under the button is the same sentence the camera pages carry: A picture only tells you about the moment it was taken — check the time on every one before you act on it.

Most gauges do not have this section at all, and that is normal — see Flood cameras on the roads near you for what the button opens, why the distance is 3 km here and 15 km on the Flood cameras page, and what a missing button does and does not mean.

The flood levels

The official heights this gauge's number is read against. This gets its own section below too, and it is the other part people most often misread.

Under the pane, and not part of it, is the rainfall block: Rain already fallen upstream. That one is about the whole catchment rather than this gauge, so it stays put while you move from gauge to gauge.

Part three · Read one gauge

The last seven days

Under the reading is a card headed Last 7 days, showing the last seven days of readings for that gauge. The line under the heading tells you exactly what span is covered: Hourly readings · Mon 6 am to now.

The picture first, the figures on a press

The card opens on the chart: seven days of the river's height, drawn left to right. Press Show table at the top of the card to swap it for a table of figures — a row every three hours, newest at the top, with the columns Time, Height m and, where the site holds rainfall for that catchment, Rain mm. Press Hide table to come back to the picture.

Two things about the table are worth knowing before you read a number off it:

• The height is the reading at that time. The rain is a total. Because the rows are three hours apart, the rain figure is everything that fell in the three hours up to that time, not just in the hour named. The line under the table says so as well.
• A dash is not a zero. In the height column it means the gauge sent nothing for that hour. In the rain column it means no rain gauge in that part of the catchment reported. Neither is a measurement of nothing happening.

The table scrolls inside the card rather than making the card seven days tall. It is also a proper table for a screen reader, so each figure is announced with the time and the column it is in.

How to read the chart

• The numbers up the side. Three of them, in metres, at the top, middle and bottom. The scale is stretched to fit whatever the river has been doing, so it is not the same from gauge to gauge, or even the same gauge from day to day. Always read those numbers before you judge how steep a rise looks.
• The coloured lines across it. These are the gauge's flood levels, labelled minor, moderate and major. You only see the ones that fall inside the range being shown, so a level well above the current river is simply off the top of the picture.
• The dot at the right-hand end is the latest reading, the same number as the big one above.
• Breaks in the line are hours the gauge did not report. The line stops and restarts rather than being drawn straight across a gap, so you can see what is measured and what is missing.

What you are looking for is the shape: rising, falling, or flat, and how steeply. Seven days is long enough to show a flood peak passing, and the rise before it, and short enough to stay legible on a phone.

Reading one hour off the chart

The three numbers up the side are a scale, not readings. To get the actual number behind a particular bump, point at the chart, or on a phone, tap it and drag along it. If you want several hours side by side rather than one at a time, press Show table and read them off the table instead. A line marks the hour you are on, a ring marks the reading, and a small box gives its height and hour, like 1.42 m above Wed 5 pm. On a phone that box stays up when you lift your finger, so you have time to read it. Tap somewhere else on the chart to move it.

It always lands on a reading the gauge actually sent, never a point in between. Where the gauge went quiet, the nearest reading either side is what you get, and the hour printed under the height is how you can tell.

The chart is also reachable by keyboard. Tab to it and use ← and → to step hour by hour, Home and End for the two ends of the window, and Esc to clear the box. Each reading is announced as you land on it.

Rain on the same seven days

Where the site holds rainfall for that part of the catchment, a Rainfall button sits at the top of the card. It is off when the card opens, because the everyday question is "is my river rising?" rather than "why". Press it and a second picture appears under the chart, headed Rain already fallen on Lockyer Creek or whichever area applies: bars, one per hour, over the same seven days, so you can line up a rise in the river with the rain that caused it. Hide rainfall puts it away again.

• The line under the heading is the average across that area's rain gauges — 42 mm on average over the last 7 days. Where we do not hold the whole week it adds how much we do hold: · 160 of 168 hours held, so a small total on a thin record is not read as a dry week. Where we hold no hourly rain at all for that part it says No hourly rainfall held for the last 7 days.
• The dropdown beside the heading picks which part of the catchment the bars are for, and it only appears where there is more than one to choose from. A part marked (above a dam) drains into a dam rather than into your gauge.
• You may instead see Loading the rainfall…, The rainfall couldn't be loaded just now. or No rainfall stored for this group in the last 7 days. The river's own line is unaffected by all three.

This panel is one gauge's neighbourhood over one week. The whole catchment at five different windows is the block under the pane — Rain already fallen upstream. The Rainfall button does not govern that block, and it never touches the Rain mm column in the table: that column is the figures behind the card and is always there.

If the chart does not draw

You may see Loading the last 7 days…, The last 7 days couldn't be loaded just now, or No readings from this gauge in the last 7 days. None of these affects the rest of the pane: the height, the status and the flood levels come from elsewhere and are still good.

Part three · Read one gauge

Against past floods

Where the site holds historic flood peaks for a gauge, a Past floods button appears at the top of the chart card. Pressing it opens a column beside the chart headed Against past floods, ranking today's reading against the major floods on that gauge's record: 2022, 2011, 1974, and whatever else has been transcribed for it.

Under the column is the sentence most people actually want: Today is 8.31 m below the Jan 1974 peak. It names the highest flood on record at that gauge, which is not always 1974. Upstream of Wivenhoe it usually is. On the Bremer it can be an older flood still. At a gauge where 2022 is the only flood the site holds, it will be Feb 2022.

If a gauge has no Past floods button, there is nothing to show for it: either no peaks have been transcribed, or the ones that exist were recorded against a different zero point and cannot honestly share this gauge's scale. The site drops them rather than converting them.

The button starts off every time you open a gauge. The everyday question is "is it rising?", so the comparison with past floods is something you go and ask for rather than something put in front of you.

Part three · Read one gauge

Flood levels, and the four things this panel can say

At the bottom of each gauge is the panel that makes the height mean something: the minor, moderate and major levels for that specific location, with a one-line description of what each one does on the ground. Levels the river has already passed are tinted.

Check the heading of this panel. It is one of four, and they are not interchangeable.

Datum: why you must never compare two gauges' numbers

The last line of the panel reads Heights are metres on this gauge's own datum (LGH), or (AHD).

A datum is the fixed zero point a height is measured up from, and different gauges use different ones. 3.4 m at one gauge and 3.4 m at the next are not the same amount of water, and not the same amount of trouble. A height only means something when you read it against that gauge's own flood levels.

The letters in brackets are the name of the zero point being used. LGH means the zero belongs to that gauge alone. AHD means it is the national one, in effect height above sea level. There is nothing for you to do with either; they are printed so you can see when two gauges are not measuring from the same place.

This is also why you should be careful quoting a number you read elsewhere. If a figure from another site or a news report is on a different datum, it can be wrong by several metres in either direction, and in a flood, the direction it is wrong in is the whole question.

Part three · Read one gauge

Rain already fallen upstream

Under the gauge pane is a block headed Rain already fallen upstream, with the line The areas that drain into these gauges, wettest first. This is what is still on its way down. It answers the question a river height cannot: is more water coming?

It is about the catchment, not about the gauge you have open, so it stays where it is while you move from one gauge to another. Everything in it has already fallen. Nothing here is a forecast.

The grid

One row per area — the parts of the catchment that drain towards your gauges, wettest first — and six columns of millimetres: 1 hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, 24 hours, 3 days and 7 days. Read a row left to right and it tells you whether the rain is still falling or already through.

Every figure is an average. It is the rain averaged across the rain gauges in that area that reported, which is our own working rather than a Bureau figure. So it answers “how much rain fell on this area”, not “how much fell at the wettest spot”. Rest your pointer on a cell and it tells you what the wettest single rain gauge caught, which is the number that matters when heavy rain sits over one valley and misses the rest.

• The shading ranks, the number tells. Cells are shaded from dry to wettest within their own column, so a dark cell under 1 hour and a dark cell under 7 days are nothing like the same amount of rain. Every cell prints its figure, so covering up the colour loses you nothing.
• A dash is not a zero, and <0.1 is neither. A dash means nobody in that area reported. A 0 means they did report, and it was dry. <0.1 means a little rain fell but spreading it across the area leaves less than a tenth of a millimetre. The line under the grid says this too.
• The last two columns are ruled off from the first four because they are a different measurement: 3 days and 7 days are whole Bureau days ending at 9 am, from a wider network of rain gauges. On an afternoon they stop hours before the hourly columns do, so rain that fell this morning is in 6 hours and in neither of them. They cannot be added to the hourly figures beside them, and the two sets are not one series.
• above the dam on a row means rain falling on that area only reaches your gauges if the dam releases it, so it is not counted in their figures. The first gauge below the wall is what shows a release.

Each figure carries the whole of what it rests on — how many rain gauges reported and the hours it actually covers. Rest your pointer on a cell to see it; a screen reader is read it in place of the bare number.

What these figures cannot tell you

A closed panel at the foot of the block, in those words. It is worth opening once. It says that the figures cover the whole area draining towards the gauges rather than the ground just above any one of them; that a silent rain gauge is not a rain gauge reading zero; that on some catchments the area boundaries were worked out by hand from place names rather than surveyed; the dam rule above; and the nine o'clock rule above. Only the ones that are actually true of the grid on screen are shown.

Each rain gauge in this part

Under the grid, on gauges where we hold them, is a table headed Each rain gauge in this part: the individual rain gauges inside the area your open gauge sits in, one row each. The wettest over the last six hours are at the top, and the ones that have sent nothing are at the bottom rather than mixed in among the dry ones — a rain gauge nobody has heard from is not the driest gauge in the catchment. This is the only place on the site that shows which rain gauge went quiet.

• The columns are 1 hour, 3 hours and 6 hours, and then 24 hours, 3 days and 7 days where those figures exist for that area. A column that is not there is one nothing has been stored for, not a column of zeroes.
• None and a dash are different. None is a rain gauge that reported no rain. A dash is one that sent nothing for that window.
• The count under the table — 18 of 24 rain gauges reporting — is counted over six hours, so it matches the figures in the grid above rather than the long columns.
• A repeated name carries which one it is. Two different rain gauges are both called Dayboro and they report different numbers, so the second is labelled 2nd of that name.

When there is nothing to show

The block always uses words rather than leaving a blank, because a blank under a heading reads as "no rain".

• The Bureau of Meteorology publishes no rainfall bulletin for this catchment, so there are no rainfall figures for these gauges. This is not a reading of no rain. 351 of the gauges this site publishes sit under New South Wales or South Australian products, and there is no Queensland rainfall bulletin behind them.
• Rainfall figures couldn't be loaded just now. The river heights above are unaffected. Our end. The heights, the chart and the flood levels are all fine.
• Loading the individual rain gauges…, or No individual rain gauge readings are stored for this part yet. This is not a reading of no rain. — the table under the grid only, and the grid above it is unaffected either way.

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Seeing your gauges on a map

On the front page, See these on a map opens a picture of your chosen gauges, drawn where they actually are and coloured by flood status. It stays closed until you ask for it, so it uses none of your data if you never open it.

Under the picture is a key listing each gauge against its numbered pin. The key runs upstream to downstream, but the numbers run the other way. Pin 1 is the gauge lowest down the river, and the gauge furthest upstream has the highest number. So do not read the numbers as an order. Find the gauge you want in the key, then look for its number on the map.

A few gauges cannot be put on a map at all, because the Bureau's records do not include a location for them. The site lists those underneath the picture by name, rather than leaving you to wonder why you counted nine dots for ten gauges.

Press the picture to open a full map you can pan and zoom, in a new tab. The pins there are the same numbers in the same colours. Your river list stays behind it, which is the point of the new tab.

Press a pin on that map and it opens the gauge in four lines: its name, where it is, what it is reading now and what that reading means — for example 2.90 m · Below minor flood level — and underneath, the three official flood levels for that spot. It is the same wording as the gauge’s own page, and it updates while the bubble is open. A gauge that has stopped reporting says No current reading rather than showing you the last height it sent, and one whose flood levels we do not hold yet says that too.

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Flood cameras on the roads near you

Flood cameras, in the panel under the site's name on the front page, opens a page of road cameras — closest first, each one labelled with which of your gauges it sits near and how far away it is. They are Queensland Traffic's cameras, and they are there because a road authority puts a camera where a road crosses water and the Bureau puts a gauge at the same crossing. A height tells you how deep the river is; a picture tells you whether the road is under it.

Every way in

There are only two camera screens on this site: the Flood cameras page, which shows one recent picture per camera, and one camera's own page, which shows its last two days. Four things lead into them.

There is no camera on the map and none on the printed report. The map's pins are gauges and heights; the report is the Bureau's numbers, which we can put on paper. A picture is somebody else's, it goes out of date in fifteen minutes, and a printed one would be a photograph of a road with no honest way to say how old it is.

Both camera screens have River Flood Watch at the top left with a way back beside it. On the Flood cameras page that is ← Back to my gauges, or ← Back to Colleges Crossing when you arrived from a gauge. On one camera's own page it is ← Back to the cameras. These go back rather than reload, so the river you left is still there with its readings.

Getting there from a gauge

You do not have to start from that panel. Open any gauge and, if there is a camera within 3 km of it, the gauge's own page carries a short section between the chart and the flood levels, headed Flood cameras near here. The button under that heading names the count — on Colleges Crossing, on the Brisbane River, that is 1 flood camera near here — and the line under the button names the closest one and how far it is: Nearest is 850 m away, at Karana Downs. Press it and you get the Flood cameras page opened on that gauge rather than on all of yours, with ← Back to Colleges Crossing at the top to return. The address in your browser names the gauge too, so it is a link you can send somebody: they see the cameras at that crossing whether or not they follow it themselves.

3 km, not the 15 km the Flood cameras page uses. The two are answering different questions. On that page you are browsing a region and every card tells you which gauge it is near and how far; on a gauge page you have just read one height and you are deciding whether to drive, and a camera 12 km away is on a different stretch of river and usually a different road. So the button is rare — 91 of the 1,824 gauges we know the position of have a camera that close, about one in twenty — and when it appears the camera really is at the crossing. If there is nothing within 3 km, the Flood cameras page has Near my gauges a line below, still searching to 15 km.

No button means we cannot say there is a camera there. Usually that is because there isn't one within 3 km, but it is also what you get if the camera list could not be reached, or if the Bureau's records carry no position for that gauge. The page never claims there is nothing nearby; it just doesn't offer the shortcut.

Most gauges have no camera, and that is normal

There are 118 of these cameras for the whole state, so the usual answer is No camera near your gauges. That is not a fault, and the page says so plainly: it means the camera list answered and had nothing within 15 km of any gauge you watch. They are thickest in Wide Bay, the Burnett and Far North Queensland, and thinnest around Brisbane and Ipswich — there is exactly one state camera in greater Brisbane, at Colleges Crossing. Councils run their own cameras in the southeast, and those are on your council's disaster dashboard rather than here.

What the top of the Flood cameras page tells you

Above the pictures, under the heading Flood cameras, are three measured facts about all the cameras at once, and sometimes a fourth. They are there so you can tell a quiet camera from a page that has stopped working.

• Last check — when our job last read Queensland Traffic's list. If this is hours old, the fault is at our end and every picture below is that old too.
• With a picture — how many of the cameras we are holding a picture for, out of all of them: 112 of 118. It says we have something to show you, not that the camera answered us just now.
• Newest picture — the publish time of the freshest picture anywhere in the state.
• Flagged — how many cameras are behind their own schedule and how many have nothing to show: 2 late · 1 no picture. This row is only there when there is something to flag. It never counts a camera that is asleep for the night, and it never counts the 45 cameras we cannot hold to a schedule — 44 that never say how often they send, and one that claims a new picture every minute, which is faster than we go and look. There is nothing to measure those against, so we do not guess.

Under those, four short notes repeat the rules in one line each: Stills, not video, The time shown, The stamp wins and Two days back. They say the same thing as the warning above and as the disclaimer, in the same words, on purpose — a safety notice that changes its wording from page to page is one nobody trusts.

What one card tells you

Each camera is a card, and every card carries the same things. The two lines about how old the picture is only appear when they apply.

• The picture, with Published 3:15 pm across the bottom of it. If there is no picture the frame says No current picture instead. There is never a stand-in photograph.
• A warning across the picture, when the picture is behind schedule. Under the time you will see Picture is 1 h 58 m old — do not rely on it, and the card's border turns to a dashed line. That appears when a camera has missed two of its own refreshes — on most cameras that means an hour with nothing new. It also appears on a card with no picture at all.
• Or a note saying the camera is asleep. This camera sleeps overnight — next picture after 6 am, on the 55 cameras that only send between 6am and 6pm. That is the timetable working, not a fault, so the border stays solid and nothing is flagged. It is there so an old time on a night-time picture does not read as a picture of tonight.
• The place, over the road. Karana Downs in small type above Mt Crosby Rd near Colleges Crossing. Some cameras get one line rather than two: we only split the name when the feed states the locality separately, because guessing at it from the punctuation puts a town 60 km away on the card with nothing on screen looking wrong.
• How far it is from your gauge, when the page is showing cameras near gauges: 850 m from your Colleges Crossing gauge.
• Who supplied it, in small type at the foot of the card. It changes from camera to camera, so each one carries its own credit.

Anywhere on the card opens the camera, the picture included. The road name is also a proper link, so you can middle-click it, open it in a new tab, or copy the address. Selecting the text to read or copy it does not open anything.

Looking somewhere else

The Show dropdown above the pictures switches between the cameras near your gauges, every camera in Queensland, and one Transport and Main Roads district at a time. Each line carries its own count, so you can see what you are about to get before you choose it: Near my gauges (5), Everywhere in Queensland (118), and the same count in brackets after each district's name. The districts are the road department's own eight regions, not council areas — there is no council name in the camera list for us to sort by. On Everywhere in Queensland the cards are grouped under those district names with a count at the end of each heading rather than run together in one long grid.

If you arrived from a gauge, that gauge is the first line in the dropdown — Near Colleges Crossing — and the page opens on it. Your own gauges are still there, one line below. The line under the dropdown always says which distance you are looking at: 1 camera within 3 km of Colleges Crossing becomes 5 cameras within 15 km of your gauges when you switch, so the count changing is never a mystery. Beside that line, Checked 3:20 pm says when the page last refreshed itself; it does that on its own every five minutes while you leave it open.

If a camera has stopped sending, its card stays on the page and says No current picture rather than disappearing. A card that vanished would be the one crossing you were looking for, gone on the night its camera failed.

When the page cannot answer

Five things can go wrong, and the page says which one it is rather than showing you an empty grid. None of them is the site telling you there is no camera there.

• No camera near Savages Crossing — the camera list answered and had nothing within 3 km of that gauge. Near my gauges in the dropdown widens the search to 15 km, and the message says so.
• No camera near your gauges — the same answer at 15 km, across every gauge you watch.
• We can't reach the camera list right now — our end, not yours. The page keeps trying, so leaving it open is enough, and the message links you to QLDTraffic, which has the same cameras.
• We don't have that gauge any more — a link named a gauge this site no longer publishes. You get your own cameras instead, and the page says that is what it did.
• We don't know where the gauge is, with the gauge named — the Bureau holds no position for it, so nothing can be measured from it. That is true of 62 gauges.

And if you have not chosen any gauges yet, the page says You haven't chosen any gauges yet, shows you every camera in Queensland, and offers Choose gauges to fix it.

The last two days at one crossing

Press a camera and you get that camera on its own, headed One camera · two days with the camera's full description as the title, and every picture we have kept from the last two days. Two buttons, ← Older and Newer →, step through them one at a time, and the slider between them jumps anywhere in the two days.

The line under the picture changes with it and says two things: Published 3:15 pm and Picture 12 of 96. A picture whose time we cannot read says Time unknown rather than borrowing the clock off the one beside it. If a picture reaches its two days while you are looking at it, its frame says This picture has passed its two days and been deleted — the picture is gone, not hidden.

On a phone or tablet you can swipe the picture instead of reaching for the buttons: swipe left for the newer picture, right for the older one, the same way the arrows point. A pinch to zoom in on the clock burned into the corner leaves the picture where it is.

This is the one thing a single picture cannot tell you: whether the water at that crossing is higher or lower than it was an hour ago. Look and decide for yourself. The site will not tell you the water is rising, will not draw a line through the pictures and will not say how fast — that would be a forecast, and forecasts come from the Bureau of Meteorology, not from us.

One picture loads at a time, on purpose. These are big files — about half a megabyte each — so loading all of a camera's two days at once would cost around 55 MB, which is not a thing to do to somebody on a phone in a flood. Stepping back over pictures you have already seen is free, because your browser keeps them.

We keep two days and then delete, so a camera that has been quiet for longer than that has nothing here. The page says No pictures kept for this camera yet and points you back to the list, which still shows its latest picture if there is one. When there are pictures, the line at the foot says how much it actually has — 96 pictures, 4:00 pm, 19 Aug to 3:30 pm — because a camera we only started following this morning has this morning, not two days. On the rare camera that has published more than we can list in one go, a line says so and tells you the oldest are the ones shown.

Whose pictures these are

At the foot of both camera screens are the credits, in labelled blocks: Where the pictures come from (the owner's own words, not our summary of them), Accuracy (Transport and Main Roads' own statement about what the state does and does not promise about this data) and Licence. The pictures are Queensland Traffic's, licensed CC BY 4.0, and every card also carries the credit for that particular camera.

We fetch every picture ourselves and serve our own copy, so looking at a camera does not put your browser in touch with anybody else. A job of ours collects them on a schedule, so a picture can be a few minutes behind QLDTraffic's own site. Last check at the top of the page is what tells you how far.

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Saving and sharing a report

Save as PDF on the front page builds a complete printable report of the catchment you are looking at: a cover page, a map page, and then every gauge in full, with its chart, its comparison against past floods and its flood levels, one to a page.

1. Press Save as PDF. You land on the report page and the toolbar reads Preparing… 3 of 10 gauges.
2. Wait for 10 gauges ready to save. The Save button stays greyed out until every gauge and the map have finished loading. A PDF full of "Loading…" boxes would look exactly like a river with no readings at all.
3. Your browser's print dialog opens by itself the moment everything is ready. Choose Save as PDF as the destination. If you dismiss it, or you opened the report from a link rather than the button, press Save as PDF on the report's own toolbar instead.

Everything on the paper carries a date, including the year: when the readings were taken, and when the report was made. Each gauge's page repeats the disclaimer and the reading time underneath it, so a single page torn off a stapled report is still safe to read on its own.

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Flood alerts

The site can send your phone or computer a notification when one of your gauges passes a flood level. Press Alerts in the top-right corner. There is no account and no email address. Alerts are set up per device, so turning them on here does not turn them on anywhere else, and turning them off on your phone leaves your laptop still alerting.

1. Press Turn on alerts. Your browser asks permission first. Nothing is sent to us until you say yes.
2. Set a level against each gauge you want. Every gauge on your river list appears with a dropdown reading No alert. Choose Minor and above, Moderate and above or Major and above. Each takes effect straight away; there is no save button.
3. Expect every catchment here, not just the one you were reading. This is the one screen that ignores the catchment dropdown, because alerts are a standing arrangement rather than a view. If you watch more than one river system the gauges are grouped under a heading naming each catchment, with a count of how many are set in it, so you can see at a glance which river a gauge belongs to.
4. Ten gauges per device is the limit. The count above the list reads 3 of 10 set. That is the same number you may choose per catchment, so one river system in full fits, but if you watch two, you cannot be alerted about every gauge on your list. Once ten are set the dropdowns on the rest grey out; clear one and they come back.
5. Choose the level you would actually act on. Minor on a gauge that reaches minor most winters will teach you to ignore the notification, and then it is worth nothing on the day that matters.
6. Check the card at the top says Alerts are on for this device. That is the only line that means messages can actually reach you. If it reads Alerts are not set up on this device, your browser has allowed notifications but this device is not registered with us, so nothing would be sent whatever levels you set below. Press Turn on alerts again to finish. It can say this if setting up was interrupted, or if your browser cleared the site's data.

You get one alert each time the river passes the level, not one an hour while it stays up. The alert only becomes ready to fire again once the gauge drops back below the level you chose. So a flood that sits above minor for two days sends you one message, and a river that falls and then rises again sends a second.

The message names the level the river has actually reached, which may be higher than the one you asked for: a gauge already at major when the alert goes out says Major flooding. A river that keeps climbing after that does not send you a second message, so once you have been told a river is up, go and look at it rather than waiting to be told again.

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Links you can send someone

Every screen on this site is a real address. All of them work from cold, on a phone, pasted into a message.

Two things worth understanding about sharing:

• A gauge link always works, even if the person receiving it has never chosen that gauge. A link like that points at one particular gauge out of everything the site publishes, so it does not matter what is on their own list.
• Every other link opens their gauges, not yours. Send someone /catchment/brisbane and they see their own Brisbane gauges, or, if they follow none there, a page telling them so by name. If you want them to see a specific gauge, send the gauge link.
• The camera links follow the same rule. /cameras opens the recipient's own cameras, because which ones are “yours” is worked out from the list on their device. The two that name something — /cameras/near/… and a camera's own page — show that crossing to anybody, whether or not they follow the gauge. Those are the ones to send.

Part five · Reference

If something looks wrong

My gauges have disappeared and the default river is back.

Your browser data was cleared, or you are on a different device or a private window. The list is stored on the device, with no account behind it. Re-choose them from Choose gauges.

I searched my suburb and got "No gauge matches".

Expected, for most suburbs: the box searches gauges, and it only matches a suburb where a gauge actually stands. It does not mean your area has no gauge covering it. Find your river or creek on a map, then search that name, or scroll to its heading in the list. If the message instead says every match has been quiet for 5 days or more, that filter is on; the message itself carries a Show all … anyway link that turns it off.

A tick box will not tick.

That catchment is full at ten. Untick something in the same catchment; the river card the row sits in says Untick one for another, and the catchment heading above says how many of its ten you have used.

A gauge shows a height but no colour and no status.

The site does not hold usable flood levels for it, so it will not guess what the height means. The flood levels panel at the bottom of that gauge says which of the reasons applies.

The whole river list is grey.

None of your gauges is currently reporting. Check the update line on the card and the stale-data notice; then go to the Bureau for official heights.

The heights have not moved in hours.

If the site's data supply has stopped, the notice at the top of the list says so and tells you how old the readings are. If there is no notice, the data is arriving and the river genuinely has not moved, which on a flat day is the normal state of a river.

The rainfall grid shows a dash where I expected a number.

A dash means no rain gauge in that area reported for that window. It is not a measurement of no rain — that is a 0. If the whole block is missing, the Bureau publishes no rainfall bulletin for that catchment, and the block says so in those words. See Rain already fallen upstream.

The rainfall figures do not add up between the two tables.

Usually one of two honest reasons. The list of individual rain gauges only includes ones that have reported in the last eight hours, so its 24-hour column can be lower than the area's own 24-hour figure above it. And the 3-day and 7-day columns are whole days ending at 9 am, so rain that fell this morning is in the shorter columns and in neither of those. Both are said in words under the rows.

The map is missing, or a gauge is not on it.

The Bureau's records do not include a location for every station. The site lists any it cannot place underneath the picture. Their heights still work as normal.

My gauge has no Flood cameras near here button.

Usually because there is no camera within 3 km of it, which is the normal answer: the button appears on about one published gauge in twenty. It is also what you get if the camera list could not be reached, or if the Bureau holds no position for that gauge. The gauge page never claims there is nothing nearby — it just does not offer the shortcut. Open Flood cameras from the front page to search out to 15 km.

A camera's picture has not changed in half an hour.

Normal. Most cameras send a new picture every 15 to 30 minutes, and 55 of the 118 only send between 6am and 6pm — those say This camera sleeps overnight on the card. The card tells you which case you are in: a dashed border with do not rely on it means that camera is behind its own schedule, No current picture means it has gone dark, and if Last check at the top of the page is hours old, the fault is at our end and everything below it is that stale. A card that says nothing about its age is one of the 45 cameras we cannot hold to a schedule, so read the time and the camera's own burned-in clock and judge it yourself.

The picture looks clear but the road is closed.

Believe the road, not the picture. It is a still, it is at least as old as the time printed under it, and the clock burned into its corner is the one to trust. Closures come from your council and from qldtraffic.qld.gov.au.

Save as PDF is greyed out.

It is still loading. The line beside it counts the gauges as they settle, and the button enables when they have all finished.

If none of those is what you are seeing, tell us. The one always worth sending is a height that disagrees with the Bureau’s own page for the same gauge. Trust the Bureau, and let us know, because that is a fault at our end. Naming the gauge and the height you saw saves us a day.

That form is not a way to report a flood and the mailbox behind it is not monitored during an emergency. In an emergency call 000, or the SES on 132 500.

Part five · Reference

What this site will not tell you

Knowing the edges of a tool is part of using it well. This one deliberately does not do any of the following.

• It does not forecast. Every number is an observation already taken. Nothing on this site predicts a peak, a time, or a height.
• It does not issue warnings. Warnings come from the Bureau of Meteorology and your state emergency service.
• It does not know where your house is. A gauge height is the height of the river at the gauge. What that means for your street depends on ground level, and this site holds no ground levels.
• It does not tell you a road is open. The band descriptions say what typically happens at that level in general terms. Local closures are council's and the police's to publish.
• It cannot be relied on to notify you. Alerts exist (see Flood alerts), but they are hourly rather than live, they travel through your browser maker's servers, and a message that never arrives leaves no trace. Treat one as a prompt to go and look, never as the thing that tells you to act.

On the day it matters, the sequence is: look here for the shape of what is coming, then act on what the Bureau and your emergency service tell you.