Everything FloodRadar shows is built from public open data. This page lists each dataset we use, what it powers, how often it refreshes, and the attribution its licence requires. FloodRadar is independent — not endorsed by or affiliated with the Environment Agency, SEPA, Natural Resources Wales or any government body.
Powers every England station page, the warnings map, alerts and predictions. Synced every 15 minutes.
This uses Environment Agency flood and river level data from the real-time data API (Beta). Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0.
Powers Scottish station pages and alerts. Readings synced every 15 minutes.
Contains SEPA data © Scottish Environment Protection Agency and database right 2025.
Powers the rainfall explorer, rain-response models and deep rainfall history (back to ~2000).
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025 (OGL v3.0).
Powers the Met Office warning strip on the homepage and Next 24h dashboard.
Warning summaries © Met Office, from their public RSS feed.
Powers hourly forecast rain on station pages and the Next 24h timeline.
Weather data by Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0).
Powers the postcode flood-risk pages and the report's official band tables. Re-imported quarterly.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025. All rights reserved. Some features of this map are based on digital spatial data from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, © NERC (CEH). © Crown Copyright and Database Rights 2025 OS AC0000807064. This product is produced in part from PAF® and Multiple Residence Data, the copyright in which is owned by Royal Mail Group Limited and/or Royal Mail Group plc. All rights reserved. Licence number AC0000807064.
~31,700 mapped extents of floods that actually happened, back to 1946. Powers the recorded-floods explorer, station-page flood history and the report's history section. Quarterly.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025. All rights reserved.
Every official warning since 2006. Powers warning-history charts and counts. Quarterly, plus live accumulation.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025. All rights reserved.
Rivers & sea likelihood, surface water, Flood Zones 2 & 3 (planning), the 2050s climate-change scenarios, flood defences and areas benefiting from defences — drawn live on report and station maps.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025, served from the Defra Data Services Platform (OGL v3.0).
A separate, planning-grade product from the blended likelihood assessment above: three NAMED scenarios (0.1%, 1% and 3.3% annual exceedance probability — 1-in-1000/100/30-year events), each reported to one of seven depth bands (<150 mm to >2,300 mm), for both present day and a 2070s-upper-end climate-change projection (a different epoch from the 2050s bands above — the two are not directly comparable). Powers the report's section 2 scenario-depth table and the surface-water pressure rating's v2 context factor below. No national bulk download exists for this dataset (the EA's only download route is an interactive area-of-interest tool over a proprietary file geodatabase; the underlying OGC feature counts run into the hundreds of thousands per layer), so points are looked up live via the EA's WMS and banked permanently once seen — coverage grows report-render by report-render, as buyers look up new postcodes, rather than all at once.
Contains Environment Agency information © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
~141,000 line assets. Powers the report's defences section and the map overlays. Monthly import.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025 (OGL v3.0).
~510 designed flood-water storage area polygons (land engineered to hold flood water on purpose). Powers the report's flood-storage check. Quarterly import.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025, republished via planning.data.gov.uk, contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
~1 m grid. Powers the report's elevation context.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025 (OGL v3.0).
Official annual spill counts and hours per overflow, plus live discharging status. Powers /sewage and the report's overflow section.
Event Duration Monitoring data © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025; live status from the water companies' storm overflow feeds.
A 1 km grid covering Great Britain, each square classed by its worst part. Powers the report's radon screening — an area classification, never a measurement of a building.
Contains British Geological Survey materials © UKRI 2026. Radon Potential classification UK Health Security Agency © Crown copyright 2026.
Coalfield consultation (reporting) areas, Development High Risk Areas and the recorded specific-risk feature classes. Powers the report's coal screening, which tells a buyer whether the official CON29M search applies — it never replaces that search.
Contains Mining Remediation Authority information © Mining Remediation Authority 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Conservation areas, green belt, article 4 directions, tree-preservation zones and listed buildings. England only, and article 4 / TPO are published by only some councils so far — so "none found" is never "none apply".
Contains public sector information from planning.data.gov.uk licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
UK-wide planning pipeline for schemes of about 150 kW and above. Quarterly extract, imported here quarterly; operational, under-construction, consented and in-planning schemes are shown, refused and withdrawn ones are not.
Contains public sector information from the DESNZ Renewable Energy Planning Database licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Distance to the mapped HS2 route (bounded at 25 km) and whether a point falls inside a licensed onshore petroleum block (banked from the NSTA's own ArcGIS Online service; the live service kept as fallback only while the table is unready). High-voltage lines and substations come from OpenStreetMap (credited under "Location & base maps" below).
HS2 route geometry: the published HS2 route dataset. Petroleum licences: Contains information provided by the North Sea Transition Authority and/or other third parties, under the NSTA User Agreement. Used under the NSTA's own User Agreement — not the Open Government Licence.
Named bedrock and superficial formations at a point, plus recorded landslide events within 2 km. Great Britain. Formation names only — the graded subsidence datasets are commercial products we do not hold, so no grade or "at risk" verdict is offered or implied.
Contains British Geological Survey materials © UKRI 2026.
Historic landfill sites, currently authorised landfill boundaries, Category 1 and 2 pollution incidents (quarterly import) and the Part 2A contaminated-land "special sites" register. England only. A proximity screen, never a contaminated-land assessment: being near a historic landfill does not mean land is contaminated, and absence from these records does not mean it is clean.
Contains Environment Agency information © Environment Agency and/or database right. The historic landfill, authorised landfill and pollution-incident registers are used under the Environment Agency's Conditional Licence (not the Open Government Licence); its personal-data condition is why licensee and site-operator names are never shown. The special-sites register is © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
The two datasets below are stored on our own yearly refresh schedule, same as everything else on this page, but neither one is shown anywhere on FloodRadar yet — no report section, page or API reads them today. They're listed here because our policy is to document a source the moment we start storing it, not to wait until it's on-screen. Check back, or watch our news for when this becomes a visible feature.
The modelled flood extent for every large raised reservoir in England if it were to fail, under a "wet day" (rivers already high) and a "dry day" (rivers at normal level) scenario — a credible worst-case, not a prediction that any specific flood will happen. Smaller reservoirs and ones commissioned after October 2016 are not included, matching the source's own published scope.
Reservoir Flood Extents – Wet Day (National) and Reservoir Flood Extents – Dry Day (National), © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
The Environment Agency's national coastal-erosion projections (published 2024): medium-term (to 2055) and long-term (to 2105) erosion bands under both a "with shoreline management plans delivered" and a "no future intervention" scenario, each at three climate-change allowances, plus recorded coastal ground-instability zones.
National Coastal Erosion Risk Mapping (NCERM), © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Each banked planning application gets an indicative Low / Moderate / High band describing how much extra pressure it may add to local drainage — never a flood-risk prediction for any specific property, and never presented as an official rating. It is built entirely from data we already hold — nothing is fetched live to score it: the application's own size class (Large scores higher than Medium; anything smaller contributes nothing on its own), how many dwellings a development is for when that count is stated (a scheme of 30 or more counts extra, and 100 or more counts extra again, on top of the general development-keyword signal below — a bigger scheme puts proportionally more pressure on local drainage than a small one), a development keyword in its description or type that typically increases impermeable surface (warehouse, distribution, logistics, car park/parking, industrial, retail park, housing/estate, 10 or more dwellings, or solar), whether its postcode sits in an official RoFRS medium/high rivers-and-sea likelihood band, whether a recorded EA flood outline's centroid lies within 500 m of its coordinates, and whether a banked EA Flood Map for Planning check within 50 m of its coordinates falls inside the 3.3% annual-exceedance-probability (1-in-30) present-day surface-water extent (see the Flood Map for Planning entry below; the actual distance is named alongside the band wherever the rating is shown). That last check is itself banked-only: it can only ever see a point once a paid property report has probed near it, so most applications will honestly show "not yet captured" for it rather than a false negative — the same "never scored silently" rule as every other factor. The three flood-context checks (the official risk band, the recorded flood outline, and the Flood Map for Planning check) now carry more weight than the size class or development-keyword checks — revised 2026-08-03 after we found that, because every application we track is already a "Large" one, size alone was no longer telling us anything useful, and it was letting applications with no real flood-context signal at all read as High just as often as ones near a genuine flood risk. Every contributing factor — and every check that couldn't be run, e.g. no verifiable location for the application — is listed alongside the band on every surface that shows it. The methodology is versioned (currently v3); a version bump is applied fleet-wide via a re-score pass, never silently.
Decades of quality-checked daily levels and flows, groundwater boreholes. Powers long-term charts and the groundwater explorer.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025 (OGL v3.0).
Powers station catchment-character cards, gauge photos and flood-frequency context.
Data from the National River Flow Archive, © UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
A ~51-site national network. Powers antecedent-wetness context — a regional signal, not property-specific.
COSMOS-UK data © UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, available as open data.
Powers the reservoirs explorer and per-reservoir history.
Reservoir facts (coordinates, capacity, type, purpose, construction date and downstream gauge) from the UK Reservoir Inventory. Contains data supplied by UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (Durant & Counsell, 2018, Open Government Licence v3.0).
Turns a postcode into a location for every "near you" feature and the reports.
Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2025. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2025. Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2025. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains NRS data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.
PlanIt does not supply a postcode for every planning application. For applications that do have mapped coordinates, the free postcodes.io bulk API supplies the nearest postcode within 500 m. FloodRadar stores it separately as a derived postcode and labels it as mapped-location context; it never implies that the applicant or council supplied it.
Postcode data returned by postcodes.io is sourced from Office for National Statistics open postcode products under the Open Government Licence.
Map backgrounds site-wide; watercourse and culvert proximity in the report (via Overpass).
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Satellite imagery tiles © Esri.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. FloodRadar summarises public data — it is not an official Environment Agency service and never a substitute for the official GOV.UK flood-risk service or the official flood warnings. Something look wrong or missing? [email protected].
