FloodRadar
Log inCreate free account
FloodRadar
Log inCreate free account
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. Since September 2026 this also covers 304 Scottish rain gauges at 15-minute resolution, which power the rain map north of the border, the Scottish rainfall pages, and the rainfall history the flood models learn from.
Contains SEPA data © Scottish Environment Protection Agency and database right 2025.
SEPA’s Floodline RSS feed supplies current Scottish warnings, checked every 15 minutes. Warning wording and official links appear on our warnings page. The feed has no coordinates: FloodRadar joins each message to SEPA’s official warning-area boundaries (below) so it can be shaded on the maps and tested against a Scottish gauge’s own location. A gauge page says only what that one point established; a town page checks its listed gauges, never the whole town. Area notifications remain England-only. SEPA publishes no archive of past Floodline warnings, so FloodRadar’s Scottish warning history is its own record of what the feed has carried since 16 September 2026 — shown on each Scottish area page and under “Scotland” on the warning history; nothing before that date is held, which is not the same as nothing having happened.
Contains SEPA data © Scottish Environment Protection Agency and database right 2026. Used with permission confirmed by FloodRadar on 12 September 2026.
SEPA’s flood warning and flood alert area boundaries (warnings, alerts) are banked and re-checked daily, transformed from British National Grid with the OSTN15 grid, and matched to live messages by SEPA’s quick-dial directory. Maps draw a simplified outline; gauge matches use the full boundary with a 10 m uncertainty band.
©SEPA 2024; this SEPA product is licenced under the Open Government Licence 3.0.
NRW public telemetry supplies Welsh river-level and rainfall maps, station pages and charts. Readings are checked every 15 minutes. Rainfall uses individual 15-minute amounts; hourly and daily totals remain unavailable when observations are missing. Historical coverage grows with imports and correction checks.
Contains Natural Resources Wales information © Natural Resources Wales and Database Right. All rights Reserved. Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Official river and rainfall information.
The NRW live warnings v3 API supplies Welsh warnings and alerts, checked every 15 minutes. We retain NRW’s English and Welsh messages, severity and update times, with links to the official service. Points on the warnings page are reference locations, not the affected boundaries.
Welsh warning history comes from NRW’s published Historic Flood Warnings and Flood Alerts dataset (NRW_DS116342): every warning and alert issued since February 2006, updated by NRW periodically (the current file runs to June 2026), joined to the warnings FloodRadar has recorded live since September 2026. It is shown on each Welsh area page and under “Wales” on the warning history. NRW lists each issue and update separately; FloodRadar counts an update within seven days of the original as the same warning, at the highest level it reached.
Contains Natural Resources Wales information © Natural Resources Wales and Database Right. All rights Reserved. Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. NRW API portal.
NRW’s official flood warning and flood alert area boundaries are banked weekly from the DataMapWales geospatial service (layers NRW_FLOOD_WARNING and NRW_FLOOD_WATCH_AREAS). Each published set is kept whole so a change at source can be reviewed before it replaces the previous one. Display outlines are simplified for mapping; the full boundaries are retained. Live Welsh warnings are joined to their boundary by area code, shaded on the maps, and tested against a Welsh gauge’s own location with a 10 m uncertainty band. A gauge page says only what that one point established; a town page checks its listed gauges, never the whole town.
Contains Natural Resources Wales information © Natural Resources Wales and Database Right. All rights Reserved. Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Flood warning areas · Flood alert areas on DataMapWales.
NRW’s daily five-day flood risk outlook (its summary sentence in English and Welsh, the five day labels, the risk-level definitions, the local authorities above very low risk and the five outlook maps) is banked hourly through NRW’s flood forecast API and shown on the warnings page and the Flood Hub. An outlook that could not be re-checked within 30 hours is shown as unconfirmed, never as very low. Each distinct issue is kept.
Contains Natural Resources Wales information © Natural Resources Wales and Database Right. All rights Reserved. Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. NRW’s five-day outlook.
The Environment Agency’s flood maps stop at the border. FloodRadar keeps a copy of NRW’s own maps of Wales from the DataMapWales geospatial service: the Flood Map for Planning (Flood Zones 2 and 3 from rivers and the sea, layer NRW_FLOODZONE_RIVERS_SEAS_MERGED, and the TAN 15 defended zones, NRW_TAN15_DEFENDED_ZONES) and Flood Risk Assessment Wales (flood risk from rivers, from the sea, and from surface water and small watercourses, each by high, medium and low likelihood). Each copy is stamped with NRW’s publication date and checked weekly for a newer one. When a Welsh layer is switched on, the station Area map, the flood layers menu and the main map draw it over the EA’s squares in Wales in NRW’s own colours, and their credit then names Natural Resources Wales. These are planning and likelihood maps, not forecasts; where FloodRadar does not hold NRW’s map for a square, nothing of NRW’s is drawn there, which is a gap in the copy, not an absence of flood risk. Flood risk reports and point checks do not use these maps.
Contains Natural Resources Wales information © Natural Resources Wales and database right. All rights reserved. Some features of this information are based on digital spatial data licensed from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology © UKCEH. Defra, Met Office and DARD Rivers Agency © Crown copyright. © Cranfield University. © James Hutton Institute. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Reused under the Open Government Licence. Flood Map for Planning: Rivers and Sea · TAN15 Defended Zones · Flood Risk from Rivers · from the Sea · from Surface Water and Small Watercourses on DataMapWales.
The Environment Agency’s flood maps stop at the border. FloodRadar keeps a copy of SEPA’s own flood maps of Scotland, from rivers and from the sea (Flood Maps v3.0, released 25 February 2025), read from SEPA’s data publication downloads, transformed from British National Grid with the OSTN15 grid, and cut at the border so that England is drawn only from the Environment Agency’s maps. Each copy is stamped with SEPA’s issue date and checked weekly for a newer release. When a Scottish layer is switched on, the station Area map, the flood layers menu and the main map draw it over the EA’s squares in Scotland in SEPA’s own colours, and their credit then names SEPA. SEPA’s maps show likelihood, not flood zones: high (at least a 10% chance of flooding each year), medium (at least 0.5%) and low (at least 0.1%). Under the Flood zones layer a Scottish square shows medium or high likelihood darker and low likelihood lighter. These are likelihood maps, not forecasts; where FloodRadar does not hold SEPA’s map for a square, nothing of SEPA’s is drawn there, which is a gap in the copy, not an absence of flood risk. SEPA’s surface water maps are not copied. Flood risk reports and point checks do not use these maps.
© SEPA 2025; this SEPA product is licenced under the Open Government Licence 3.0. SEPA’s data attribution statements for Flood Map Version 3.0 (a copy hosted by FloodRadar, as SEPA asks: PDF, 128 KB) · SEPA’s data publication page · Open Government Licence v3.0.
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 "average rainfall a year" figures on town, place and rainfall-town pages and in Flo's answers about a named place: monthly rainfall normals on a 5 km grid across the whole UK, banked once from the CEDA archive. Where the grid is not yet banked, the same figure comes from the nearest EA rain gauge's own record and the page says so. The weather map's "vs normal" layer uses the same monthly normals to show forecast rain as a share of a normal month at each place.
HadUK-Grid v1.3.0, Met Office. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Dataset record at CEDA.
The Met Office's published areal series (the same HadUK-Grid data, averaged over each region and country), banked two ways. The 1991–2020 average for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, month by month and for the year, is the benchmark behind statements like "wetter than the UK as a whole" on rainfall pages and in Flo's answers, so a comparison rests on a real figure rather than an impression. Alongside it, every complete year of each series back to 1836 — that is what the rainfall chart on Is it getting worse? and on each county page draws, and it is the one figure on that page that needs no adjusting, because the method has not changed in nearly two centuries. Refreshed monthly, so a new year appears on its own.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Areal values from HadUK-Grid 1 km gridded climate data, Met Office National Climate Information Centre.
Powers the Met Office warning strip on the homepage, the Flood Hub and the Next 24h dashboard. Warnings are read from the Met Office Weather DataHub's NSWWS API every five minutes, with their areas, validity windows and advice; the Met Office's public RSS feed is the fallback when that bank is stale. FloodRadar never issues weather warnings of its own: anything shown as a warning is the Met Office's, unchanged. The rain pages show a banner when a rain or thunderstorm warning's area covers the place, and nothing when the warnings cannot be confirmed.
Met Office Weather Warnings © Crown Copyright 2026. Powered by Met Office data. Reused under the Open Licence (Version 1) – National Severe Weather Warning Service; see the Met Office warnings page for the official service.
Powers the "Chance of rain" box on our most-visited rain town and city pages. Once a day we ask the Met Office's Site-Specific Blended Probabilistic Forecast, through the Weather DataHub, for the chance that the rain over the next 24 and 48 hours will be more than 1 mm, 4 mm, 12 mm and so on, at the Met Office forecast point nearest each place. The box shows the Met Office's own figures and thresholds, unchanged. It disappears when the forecast is more than 30 hours old; a low chance is always shown as a chance, never as "no rain".
Powered by Met Office data. Used under the Met Office Weather DataHub terms and conditions.
The Flood Forecasting Centre's daily Flood Guidance Statement for England and Wales (Scotland is not covered; its warnings come from SEPA). We read it two ways every 30 minutes: the areas of concern with a risk level (very low to high) for each of the next five days, as published on Check for flooding, and the statement itself from the Flood Forecasting Centre's statements API: when it was issued, and in the forecasters' own words what rivers, surface water, the coast and groundwater are expected to do, and where. Shown on the Next 24h dashboard and the Flood Hub only while confirmed within the last two hours; otherwise the pages say it is unavailable. FloodRadar's own models are not part of it.
Flood Forecasting Centre (Environment Agency and Met Office), via Check for flooding and the Flood Guidance Statement API. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Powers Rain radar and the radar view on Next 24h. Estimated rain rate on a 1 km grid, published every 15 minutes, within 20 minutes of observation. Radar images are observations, not forecasts.
British Crown copyright, Met Office. Recoloured and reprojected by FloodRadar. Derived images are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source and archive.
Powers hourly forecast rain on station pages and the Next 24h timeline, where the national chart is the heaviest square anywhere in each hour and the summary names the wettest places over the next 24 hours by their nearest town (Ordnance Survey Open Names). A banked copy of the ICON model's rain forecast (the live forecast, and the archive of past forecasts as they were issued) is used by the Nimbus flood model from 14 September 2026, both to train it and in its live forecasts. The homepage radar's "Forecast rain · next 24 hours" switch (desktop) draws the same banked forecast for every 15 km square over Great Britain, refreshed every six hours and redrawn hourly; each frame says when the run was issued, and a run older than nine hours is not shown. The moving streaks over the radar and forecast layers are the same model's wind at 10 m for the hour on show, drawn as a flow; they are model output too, never a measurement. A forecast is a model's expectation, not an observation.
A second banked copy feeds the weather map's place panel (since 7 October 2026): FloodRadar asks Open-Meteo once or twice a day, for every half-degree square over Great Britain, for the hourly rain of all 51 runs of ECMWF's ensemble forecast (the spread of the runs and the expected range for the next three days) and of three more models, the Met Office's, Météo-France's and DWD's ICON, for the Models tab's comparison. Nothing is fetched while a visitor waits, and a square not banked yet is shown as not banked, never as dry.
Weather data by Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0); model DWD ICON. Forecast squares and the wind flow redrawn by FloodRadar. For that second copy, also: the ECMWF IFS ensemble, based on data and products of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (source www.ecmwf.int, CC BY 4.0), processed by FloodRadar, and ECMWF accepts no liability for this use; atmospheric forecasts from the UK Met Office, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0: the charts FloodRadar draws from them are shared under the same licence, and the Met Office's figures are never served by FloodRadar's public API or used in the paid Property Report; atmospheric forecasts from Météo-France; and DWD ICON (Deutscher Wetterdienst).
Worked out every 15 minutes from the ECMWF (or, when ECMWF is late, GFS) weather-model runs already listed here: a low deepening at or above the "weather bomb" rate (24 hPa in 24 hours at 60°N, scaled for latitude) is named on the homepage, the Next 24h page and the weather map, and kept for 36 hours after its peak. Record river levels (England) come from Environment Agency readings against the EA's own published record for each gauge: two readings in a row at or above it, from a gauge not flagged as faulty, shown while the river is above it and for 24 hours after. "A month's rain in 3 days" compares ECMWF's forecast rain over each 72-hour window of the next few days with the Met Office's 1991–2020 average for that month at each place, and is named when a place is forecast at least a whole month's rain (and at least 25 mm). Each item says whether it is a measurement or a forecast model; none is an official warning.
Based on data and products of ECMWF (CC BY 4.0) and NOAA GFS. Contains Environment Agency data (Open Government Licence). Average rainfall: Met Office HadUK-Grid 1991–2020 (OGL v3). Place names: Ordnance Survey Open Names (OGL).
Used only to test FloodRadar's own flood model against past storms (the "storm replay"): the rain that NOAA's Global Forecast System forecast one, two and three days ahead, as it was issued, for storms before the Open-Meteo archive begins in 2024. Nothing on the site shows it, and the live Nimbus model does not use it.
NOAA Global Forecast System, 0.25°, from the NOAA Open Data Dissemination archive (US public domain). Rain amounts extracted and regridded by FloodRadar.
Powers the weather map: rain, wind, gusts, waves, pressure (isobars and the lows and highs that move through the week), moisture and thunderstorm energy for the next seven days over the North Atlantic and Western Europe. ECMWF's forecast (twice a day) is shown by default and GFS (four times a day) as a second opinion; the "chance of heavy rain" layer counts how many of the 31 runs of NOAA's GEFS ensemble give 10, 20 or 40 mm in a day, and the storm-track fans draw where each of those 31 runs, and each of the 50 perturbed runs of ECMWF's own ensemble (its open-data stream, sea-level pressure only), takes a low. The model files are downloaded by FloodRadar's own jobs, cut to the map's area and redrawn; every frame names its model, run and time, a run that is late is labelled as possibly delayed, and while the map plays it says when it is blending between two model times. A forecast is a model's expectation, not an observation or a warning.
Based on data and products of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), source www.ecmwf.int, licensed under CC BY 4.0; processed by FloodRadar, and ECMWF accepts no liability for this use. NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS), GFS-Wave and Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS), from NOAA's NOMADS service and the NOAA Open Data Dissemination archive (US public domain); processed by FloodRadar; not an official NOAA product and no endorsement by NOAA is implied.
Powers the world weather globe: the same ECMWF forecast as the weather map, drawn round the whole planet every six hours for seven days (rain rate, cloud, wind at 10 metres and at the height of the jet stream, gusts, pressure and temperature), from the model's 00 and 12 UTC runs. It is collected by the weather map's own job, from the files that job already downloads. On top of it sit the official positions and forecast tracks of tropical cyclones, read every hour from the US National Hurricane Center (Atlantic and eastern and central North Pacific) and the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (worldwide, positions only). A bulletin source that has not been read for six hours is shown as unavailable, never as "no storms". The low-pressure centres and their tracks are FloodRadar's own reading of the model, not named storms or warnings.
Forecast: based on data and products of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), source www.ecmwf.int, licensed under CC BY 4.0; processed by FloodRadar, and ECMWF accepts no liability for this use. Tropical cyclone advisories: NOAA/NWS National Hurricane Center (US public domain; no endorsement by NOAA is implied). Cyclone bulletins: GDACS, © European Union, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Earth image under the forecast: Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0), based on NASA imagery, reduced in size by FloodRadar for small screens. The globe's ocean layer is the El Niño tracker's sea-surface temperature map, credited below.
Powers the El Niño 2026–27 explainer. The Oceanic Niño Index back to 1950 and the monthly Niño-region indices are transcribed from NOAA's published tables and ENSO discussions; the outlook statements are quoted from the dated Met Office and WMO releases named on the page. Nothing on that page is fetched live; the page says when each figure was issued. The El Niño live tracker (below) carries the same indices fetched twice a day.
ONI and Niño indices: NOAA/NWS Climate Prediction Center (US public domain). Outlook statements © Met Office and © WMO, quoted with attribution. Photographs on the page carry their own credit: NASA imagery is public domain; Geograph and Flickr photographs are used under CC BY 2.0 / CC BY-SA 2.0 as stated in each caption.
Powers the El Niño live tracker, fetched twice a day: the weekly and monthly sea-surface temperatures of the four Niño regions (NOAA OISST v2.1, against 1991–2020) and NOAA's relative indices; the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI, ERSST v6) and the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI), NOAA's official El Niño measure since February 2026; the Southern Oscillation Index, the central-Pacific trade-wind index and outgoing longwave radiation; upper-ocean heat content along the equator (against 1981–2010); and NOAA's monthly El Niño discussion with its odds, strength and forecast-range tables. Records and ranks on the page are FloodRadar's reading of these files, judged at the precision NOAA publishes, and say so. The same banked ONI marks the El Niño and La Niña winters on every gauge's Long Term and Rise & fall charts when “Show major events” is ticked.
NOAA/NWS Climate Prediction Center (US public domain). No endorsement by NOAA is implied.
The live globe and the Pacific map on the El Niño tracker: NOAA's daily quarter-degree sea-surface temperature against its 1971–2000 average, fetched from NOAA CoastWatch's ERDDAP server (the latest day, the same day in 1982, 1997 and 2015, and the last 26 weeks), and painted by FloodRadar. Recent days are preliminary and are replaced by NOAA's final analysis about two weeks later.
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature v2.1 (US public domain), served by NOAA CoastWatch ERDDAP. Huang, B. et al. (2021), doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-20-0166.1.
The tracker's "Is there more heat to come?" section: the volume of water warmer than 20 °C along the equatorial Pacific, monthly, against 1981–2010.
Data: GTMBA Project Office, NOAA/PMEL (US public domain).
The tracker's daily Niño 3.4 figure. Climate Reanalyzer publishes the daily sea-surface temperature of the region; FloodRadar subtracts its 1991–2020 average for the same day, so the daily anomaly is FloodRadar's calculation, and the last two weeks are preliminary.
ClimateReanalyzer.org, Climate Change Institute, University of Maine · NOAA OISST v2.1 (CC BY 4.0).
The plume on the El Niño tracker: what 26 computer models — some physics-based, some statistical — expect the Niño 3.4 three-month average to do over the next nine seasons. IRI publishes this as a figure rather than a data file, so FloodRadar reads the values off the published figure and redraws them; every check must pass or nothing is shown, and the figure's own issue month is printed beside it. Used with IRI's agreement (September 2026).
ENSO Forecast Data © 2002-2026 by International Research Institute for Climate and Society is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Values read from the published figure and redrawn by FloodRadar.
The tracker's "Is this the hottest the planet has been?" section: ERA5 daily global surface air temperature since 1940 and sea-surface temperature between 60°S and 60°N since 1979, and the daily air-temperature map, from Copernicus Climate Pulse. Monthly figures against 1850–1900 are a FloodRadar estimate from the daily data and C3S's published offset for each month.
Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains. Credit: C3S/ECMWF, ERA5 (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, the oldest dated 1703. 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 warning and alert areas, flood defences and areas benefiting from defences — drawn on the report, station, town, flood-area and postcode maps. The map squares are served from FloodRadar's own copy of the Environment Agency's open data: each is fetched from the EA once, kept for up to 30 days, and refreshed within 30 days of a change. For some layers FloodRadar can instead draw the squares itself from the EA's own shapes (the same open data, downloaded from the EA and kept by FloodRadar), in the EA's colours; where it does not hold the shapes for a place, the EA's picture is shown. The shapes come from the Data Services Platform's own feature services: OGC API Features for Flood Zones, defences, warning and alert areas and the areas benefiting from defences, and its web feature service for the rivers and sea likelihood bands and their 2050s scenario.
© 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 and, as the Environment Agency's own hillshade of it, the flood map's LiDAR map style (England only; served through FloodRadar's tile cache); its raw heights, with OS Open Rivers' named rivers, draw the map's Height above the nearest river, and a tap on the map reads the height at a point.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025 (OGL v3.0).
Official annual spill counts and hours per overflow for every year 2021–2025, with each year's monitor uptime, long-term average and the EA's high-spill review lines, plus live discharging status. Powers /sewage, the water-company pages (/sewage/{company}), the per-overflow pages (/overflow/{slug}), the station and rain-gauge "overflows nearby" panels and the report's overflow section. Annual figures come from the EA's "Storm Overflow Annual Returns – All Years" layer (published March 2026) and its earlier annual-return layer.
Event Duration Monitoring data © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2026 (OGL v3.0); constituency and council-area columns contain OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Live status © the respective water company's storm overflow activity data — Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, Severn Trent Water, South West Water, Southern Water, Thames Water, United Utilities, Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water — each licensed under CC BY 4.0 (verified from each layer's ArcGIS item licence, 2026-08-27).
Wales: live overflow status © Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, read hourly from the data behind its Storm Overflow Map (dwrcymru.com/stormoverflowmap). Scotland: live overflow status © Scottish Water, from its near-real-time Overflow Map API, provided under an open licence for reuse. Scottish Water's own caveat: EDM monitors indicate overflows, they do not confirm them, and the data is not advice on water quality.
Wales annual figures (2022–2025): The Rivers Trust's Event Duration Monitoring compilations, © Dŵr Cymru/Welsh Water, Open Government Licence. Welsh spill-by-spill history (2020–2025): Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water's published EDM start/stop records. Scotland annual figures and spill-by-spill history (2021–2025): Scottish Water's reported and other monitored overflow event data, Open Government Licence. Scottish Water counts overflow events rather than the 12/24-hour spill count used in England and Wales, so the two are not directly comparable.
Hafren Dyfrdwy (Wales; 54 overflows, no live feed): annual figures (2023–2025) from The Rivers Trust's compilations of its return to Natural Resources Wales, © Hafren Dyfrdwy, Open Government Licence; spill-by-spill history (2025) from its Event Duration Monitoring log on Stream (data.streamwaterdata.co.uk), © Hafren Dyfrdwy, CC BY 4.0.
Linked bathing waters (the overflow pages): the name is the one the company's return to the Environment Agency gives (England) or Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water's overflow map gives (Wales); the link goes to that water's official profile in the Environment Agency's Bathing Water Quality data (England) or its Wales register for Natural Resources Wales, both Open Government Licence v3.0. A name is linked only when the register holds exactly that bathing water. The classification beside a name (Excellent, Good, Sufficient, Poor) is that register's latest annual classification, shown with the bathing season it is for; the register is re-read every week, so a season's results appear within a week of their publication.
Spill-by-spill history (the overflow pages, the station and rain-gauge history panels): each company's own Event Duration Monitoring log published on Stream (data.streamwaterdata.co.uk) — United Utilities, Wessex Water, Severn Trent Water, Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, South West Water and Yorkshire Water — © the respective company, CC BY 4.0.
Years a company's own log does not cover (2024 for Severn Trent Water, Anglian Water, South West Water and Yorkshire Water; 2025 for Northumbrian Water and Yorkshire Water): the Environment Agency's Event Duration Monitoring storm overflow start/stop detailed data — every individual discharge each company's monitors recorded, as the EA received it and not verified by the EA — © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2026, Open Government Licence v3.0. Each such discharge is marked "EA start/stop data" on its overflow page. Only the EA's Unique ID, start and stop are taken; a discharge the company's own log already holds is never taken twice.
Discharges before 28 February 2026 on the English overflow pages, and the ends of some discharges the live feed had moved past before FloodRadar's own poll saw them, come from Top of the Poops' record of the same company feeds (its per-overflow pages, read once on 21–22 October 2026), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Only the feed's own start and end times as those pages print them are taken, never Top of the Poops' derived hours or day counts; each such discharge is marked "via Top of the Poops" on its overflow page. Welsh and Scottish overflows are not covered.
Southern Water spill-by-spill history (2021 onwards): the release history behind Southern Water's Rivers and Seas Watch (riversandseaswatch.southernwater.co.uk), © Southern Water. Shown by FloodRadar: only releases Southern Water marks Genuine and that have ended; a release it marks Not Genuine or still has under review is left out, and one it later withdraws is removed. An outfall is shown under an overflow only where the two are proved to be the same by discharges they share. Re-read every week.
Thames Water spill-by-spill history (2022 onwards): Thames Water's open data service (api.thameswater.co.uk, its discharge alerts), © Thames Water Utilities Limited, used under its open data terms. Changed by FloodRadar: each Start alert is paired with the Stop that follows it to make one discharge period, a discharge whose Start or Stop is missing is left out, and monitor-offline alerts are not shown. Re-read every week.
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).
Instruments the Environment Agency leaves in a river that read dissolved oxygen, temperature, conductivity, turbidity, pH and ammonium (some also chlorophyll, blue-green algae, salinity, nitrate and FDOM) every 15 minutes. Banked every 15 minutes for the sites reporting (about 95); shown on the sewage map's Sondes layer with the last 7 days of each reading. These are raw readings, marked "Unchecked" by the Agency: a spike can be a fault or a cleaning visit, and nothing is graded. Each sonde, and each of the 14 river gauges with an EA-checked water-temperature record, has a page with its whole history as a daily low, average and high.
© Environment Agency and/or database right 2026, Open Government Licence v3.0.
Laboratory and field results from the Environment Agency's river sampling points in England: dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH, ammonia, nitrate, phosphate, turbidity, conductivity, E. coli and every other determinand the Agency publishes for a point. Banked once a day from the Water Quality Explorer; placed on the river network with OS Open Rivers so a gauge can list the samples taken upstream of it. These are dated samples, not live readings: results reach the archive days to months after the sample is taken, and many points are sampled a few times a year or not for years. Results are shown as published (a “less than” result is below the laboratory's detection limit, never zero); FloodRadar gives them no score of their own; where a UK river standard exists (ammonia, oxygen, temperature) the sewage map applies that standard's own test to a year of samples and names it.
Contains Environment Agency water quality data © Environment Agency and/or database right 2026. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
The Environment Agency's ecological grade (High, Good, Moderate, Poor, Bad) of each of England's 3,772 river stretches (“water bodies”), with its grades for single tests such as phosphate, oxygen, ammonia, river insects and fish. From the Agency's “WFD River Water Body Catchments Cycle 3 Classification 2022” file; a stretch it did not grade in 2022 shows its newest earlier grade from the Catchment Data Explorer, with that year. FloodRadar uses each stretch's catchment outline only to work out which stretch a water-sampling point is in, and which stretch each river line on the map is in: the sewage map's sampling popup shows the grade and its River health button colours the rivers by it. Checked monthly; the 2022 grades are the latest the Agency has published.
© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2024. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Catchment Data Explorer.
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 and the flood map's Soil moisture layer — 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).
Gives 19 key reservoirs, among them Rutland, Grafham, Kielder and the South West Water four, a monthly history back to January 2014, before their companies' own figures begin. Each month's national report prints these reservoirs' "% full" on a map; FloodRadar reads the map twice, independently, and keeps a figure only when both readings agree. The chart shows these as dotted month-end points.
Month-end figures before the company’s own weekly readings are read from the Environment Agency’s monthly water situation reports for England (source: water companies; © Environment Agency, Open Government Licence v3.0).
The coastlines, countries, lakes and place names under the weather map. They are served from FloodRadar's own files, so the map draws no third-party tiles and loads no third-party fonts.
Made with Natural Earth (public domain). Map drawn with MapLibre GL JS (BSD-3-Clause).
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.
Powers the property report's "select your address" dropdown. The Royal-Mail-listed address list for a postcode comes from the Homedata API (fetched once per postcode, then stored, so repeat lookups never re-call it); each selected address's building coordinates come from Ordnance Survey's OS Open UPRN open dataset, bulk-imported locally with a hosted copy as fallback. Coordinates are stored per building (UPRN), so each is resolved at most once.
Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026 (OGL v3.0). Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026. Address list via Homedata.
The rivers, canals and tidal reaches drawn on the homepage v4 map. That map has no street tiles under it, so without this a gauge would sit on a blank landmass with no water near it. Ordnance Survey's OS Open Rivers is processed once into a fixed set of paths covering Great Britain — the main rivers, every canal and every tidal reach — and stored with the site's own code. Nothing is fetched when the page is drawn.
The same dataset also helps decide which gauge is upstream of which. Each gauge is placed on Ordnance Survey's river lines and the line is followed downstream to the next gauge. Where the Environment Agency publishes its own upstream and downstream links those come first; the traced route fills in where there are none, which is every river in Scotland and Wales. Small channels are missing from the dataset, so a gauge with no traced route is unverified, not unconnected.
The same data also names the nearest watercourse to a postcode, a place or a town: what it flows into, and the river gauges downstream and upstream of it. It says where water goes on the map. It says nothing about whether anywhere floods.
How it is kept up to date: the site's server asks Ordnance Survey once a week whether there is a new edition (they publish about twice a year) and downloads it when there is. Every Monday it brings its river tables up to date with the current edition and its own list of gauges, and uses the new tables only once they pass their checks. Nothing is fetched from Ordnance Survey when a page is drawn: pages read the tables already on the server.
Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Where the Environment Agency's upstream link and the traced river route disagree about which of two gauges is higher up the river, the ground height at each gauge is one of the pieces of evidence set out for review, beside the measured order in which the two gauges rise. It was read once for every gauge from Open-Meteo's elevation service, which serves the Copernicus 90 m digital elevation model, and is stored with the site's own code; nothing is fetched when a page is drawn, and no page shows it to visitors. It is evidence for a person's decision on the review page, never a decision by itself.
Elevation by Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0), from the Copernicus DEM GLO-90 © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA.
The city and town names drawn on the homepage v4 map, so you can tell where you are looking without a street basemap under it. A fixed Great Britain list of around 190 settlements, resolved once from Ordnance Survey's OS Open Names through the postcodes.io places endpoint and stored with the site's own code; no lookup happens when the page is drawn, and nothing about a visitor is sent anywhere to render them.
OS Open Names now also names the settlement each postcode sits in on the postcode flood-risk pages, so SY5 0QH reads as Pontesbury, Shropshire. For this FloodRadar downloads the full OS Open Names file directly from Ordnance Survey once a quarter and stores, for each postcode those pages cover, the city, town, village or hamlet OS places it in, with its district, county and country. The pages read that stored copy; nothing is looked up when a page is drawn.
From the same quarterly file FloodRadar also banks a gazetteer of every populated place in Great Britain with its coordinate — 33,120 names, of which 4,342 are Scottish and 3,018 Welsh. It is what lets Flo, the page helper, answer a question that names a place it has no page for: ask about rain in Aberystwyth or Inverness and it finds the point, then reads the nearest banked gauge to it. Where more than one place shares a name the larger settlement is used and the answer says so. Nothing is looked up while a question is answered.
The same gazetteer names the towns, villages and hamlets on the "Area map" of each river gauge page, so a reader can see where the river and the gauges are. The page reads the stored copy when the map is opened. Because the gazetteer keeps one place for each name, a village that shares its name with a larger place elsewhere is not named on the map.
Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Served via postcodes.io.
Postcode settlements: Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026. Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
The "About" box on the town river-level pages and on the rainfall pages for towns and cities: a short summary of the place and its lead photo, from Wikipedia's page-summary service. It is asked for "{town}, {county}" first, and an answer is used only when it describes a settlement in the UK, so a town never borrows a namesake abroad. A background job asks for every summary once a week and stores it; the pages show the stored copy and never wait for Wikipedia. On the rainfall pages a photo is shown only when it is a Wikimedia Commons file (free to reuse), and its caption links to the Commons file page, which names its author and licence.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Photos from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own free licence.
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.
The site search box turns a typed town or place name into a map location. Nominatim answers whole names and street-level queries; because it matches complete words only, a part-typed name falls back to the postcodes.io places endpoint, which prefix-matches British settlement names. Only one of the two ever answers a given search. Neither is used for any flood-risk judgement — they move the map, nothing more.
Place-name search data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Settlement names returned by postcodes.io are sourced from the Office for National Statistics Index of Place Names, which contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right, under the Open Government Licence.
Map backgrounds site-wide (the homepage's light theme uses the standard OpenStreetMap tiles; its dark theme uses Esri's World Dark Gray canvas with Esri's reference labels on top). Maps where the data has to read clearly over the background — the recorded-floods map, rainfall station pages — draw the same OpenStreetMap tiles and grey them in the browser, so the roads stop competing with the colours carrying the data. Nothing about the tiles themselves changes. Watercourse and culvert proximity in the report comes from OpenStreetMap via Overpass.
The "Area map" on each river gauge page draws no background of its own. A reader can pick Streets (the same OpenStreetMap tiles, greyed) or Satellite (Esri's World Imagery) to see where the rivers and gauges are; the tiles are fetched from those services by the reader's browser only after that choice, and the map names its source while they are shown.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Dark canvas tiles © Esri — Esri, HERE, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS, © OpenStreetMap contributors. 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].
FloodRadar helper · beta