Weather

One flood wave down the Guadalupe

Eleven gauges on one Texas river, upstream at the top, drawn as feet above the level each one sat at on the morning of 15 July 2026 — before the rain. Press play to run the next three days. The crest passes Hunt at —, tops — at Bergheim, and reaches Spring Branch — later and — downstream. Then it stops. Canyon Dam holds it, the reservoir behind the dam climbs —, and the four gauges below the dam record nothing of it. The Kerrville gauge stops reporting for — right after its highest reading, so its true crest is unknown. Tap or hover any gauge.

A river gauge, feet above its 15 July level

Canyon Lake, the reservoir filling behind the dam

The crest, gauge by gauge

A gauge that stopped reporting

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Data & source

Data: USGS National Water Information System, instantaneous values — gauge height (parameter 00065) at ten Guadalupe River gauges and reservoir water-surface elevation (parameter 62614) at Canyon Lake, — to — —, fetched — · public domain, freely redistributable.

Scope and caveats, plainly. This is one flood on one river as its gauges recorded it — the water, not the damage or the human cost, neither of which a stage gauge measures. Every reading here is USGS provisional data (quality flag P), subject to revision. Gauge height is measured from a different local datum at every site, so the absolute numbers are not comparable down the chain; every lane is therefore drawn as the rise above the level that gauge sat at when the window opens at midnight on —, and the tooltip gives both. The Kerrville gauge and the Canyon Lake gauge each stopped reporting for a few hours during the storm; those breaks are drawn as breaks and dashed across, never filled in — Kerrville's last reading before it went dark is its highest, so its true crest is unknown and was at least that high. Readings arrive every five minutes at some gauges and every fifteen at others; the fifteen-minute gauges are drawn straight between readings. Distances are straight-line from gauge to gauge, so the channel a flood actually travels is longer than the figures here and any speed read off them is a lower bound. The small rises on the four gauges below the dam all crest on 15 July, before the wave upstream — they are local rain, not the flood. For one sober comparison at a single site: the same gauge at Comfort crested at — during the flood of — in this same valley the previous summer.