River Levels
River Levels

Current data reliability status

Data last updated: 7:00am, Thursday 21st November GMT

Source Active Monitoring Stations Active Monitoring Stations with Current Data Active Monitoring Stations with Stale Data Data Reliability Latency Inactive Monitoring Stations
Environment Agency (England) 3,448 3,376 72 97.9% 25 minutes 384
Scottish Environment Protection Agency 350 349 1 99.7% 25 minutes 72
Natural Resources Wales 230 230 0 100% 10 minutes 8
Great Britain Total 4,028 3,955 73 98.2% N/A 464

Data is defined as stale if the most recent update from the data source is more than 24 hours old. Most active stations are normally updated more quickly than that, but there are some monitoring stations which are only updated two or three times a day and where a single missed reading can therefore create a significant time gap from the most recent reading. This is a feature, not a bug - the reporting interval for some stations is deliberately increased when there is a low risk of flooding in order to conserve battery life on the gauge. So just because the latest river level is a few hours old doesn't necessarily mean that there's a problem. But if a monitoring station has gone more than a day without any updates at all then there probably is a problem - every active station should normally get at leaast one update every day.

Data reliability is the percentage of active monitoring stations with current (non-stale) data. This is usually somewhere in the 90s (often 100 for the smaller agencies); anything below around 85% indicates a potential problem somewhere.

Latency is the difference between the timestamp of the most recent data obtained from our sources and the time that the data was last pulled from those sources. Under normal circumstances this should not be more than an hour, although under times of heavy demand it can be longer.

Inactive stations are those which no longer appear in the lists of monitoring stations supplied by the data source. They are maintained here for archive purposes only so that the long term graphs and data downloads remain available. They are not included in the data reliability and latency stats.

RiverLevels.uk is an independent website. It is not associated with the Environment Agency or any other supplier of river level information. All data used on this site is supplied under licence. For queries about the data, please contact the underlying supplier.

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