About
More ways to get outside in Pennsylvania
PA Outdoor Adventure helps you find disc golf courses, mountain bike trails, lift-served downhill riding, hikes, climbing areas, zip lines, lakes and river trips. Choose an activity or search nearby. Each adventure links to its park manager or operator for current access and planning information. Our water tools include live USGS and NOAA readings where available.
Read this first
Flow thresholds are editorial guidance, not official advisories. Conditions change fast; scout, check dam-release schedules, and never rely on a single number.
Put-in and take-out coordinates are approximate, run lines are drawn straight from put-in to take-out, and gauge readings can be stale or wrong when a sensor fails. Cold water, strainers, low-head dams and scheduled releases kill people who were looking at a number instead of the river.
Sources
Map tiles by OpenFreeMap from OpenMapTiles, data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Last sync
- Latest values poll
- Sep 14, 7:54 PM (13 min ago)
- Gauge catalog sync
- Sep 14, 6:50 PM (1 h ago)
- Flow statistics sync
- Sep 13, 11:49 AM (32 h ago)
- NOAA NWPS sync
- Sep 14, 7:39 PM (28 min ago)
424 gauges · 58 runs · 152 lakes · API ok
What the colors mean
Run status
- Too low Below the run’s minimum runnable level
- Low Runnable but bony, below the ideal window
- Good Inside the ideal window
- High Above ideal, below the editorial maximum
- Dangerous Above the maximum safe level
- Unknown No reading, or the reading is more than 6 hours old
Gauge flow class
Computed from the USGS daily statistics for this calendar day, so “normal” means normal for the date rather than normal in absolute terms.
- Much below normal Below the 10th percentile for today
- Below normal 10th to 25th percentile
- Normal 25th to 75th percentile
- Above normal 75th to 90th percentile
- Much above normal Above the 90th percentile
- Unknown No discharge reading or no statistics yet
How it works
One API polls every active USGS gauge in Pennsylvania every 15 minutes, refreshes the daily percentile statistics weekly, and pulls NOAA NWPS flood categories and forecasts every 30 minutes. The site and the mobile app read the same JSON API, so run status, lake level and gauge readings always agree. If the upstream services are down, the last stored values are served with their timestamps rather than nothing.