Why FloodRadar
From the river upstream to the ground beneath your home. Get a clearer picture of what’s happening, what could come next, and when to pay attention.
Built by people who know what it means to be flooded.
Make the picture yours
The nearest rivers. Official warnings nearby. Reported overflow activity. Start with a place you care about.
Take a look around
The preview brings together nearby monitoring. It does not assess the flood risk of an individual building.
Find the signals around yours.
Storm Chaser & flood animations
Wind back the clock. Watch rainfall arrive, rivers respond and a peak move downstream. Our replays connect the numbers to what happened on the ground.
Explore how the signals connect in our animated storm example.
Why pay attention now?
El Niño is back. And the UK is part of the picture.
The Met Office’s August 2026 outlook points to increased chances of wetter, stormier conditions in the UK this autumn and early winter. The World Meteorological Organization expects El Niño to strengthen, with effects continuing into 2027.
That is a reason to follow the local picture closely. A seasonal outlook cannot tell you whether your street will flood. Rainfall, river levels and conditions in your catchment help fill in that picture.
See the local flood outlookYour local water picture
Bring the signals together. See how your river is behaving, what’s happening upstream, and what else could be affecting the places you care about.
Follow your area and set station alerts. Choose a water level to watch and receive email or supported browser push notifications when your alert conditions are met.
FloodRadarExample alertExample reading: 1.82 m. Your chosen alert level: 1.60 m.
Move the slider. This example sends no notifications.
See the latest gauge readings against their usual range. Explore past peaks, compare stations, and follow changes upstream.
Recorded reading
Hover or use the arrow keys on the chart to explore a reading.
Check reported storm-overflow activity and spill history near your river.
Explore the sewage mapLook below the surface. Follow borehole levels and longer-term groundwater changes.
Explore groundwaterSee measured rainfall, then explore how wet ground and connected rivers shape the response.
Explore rainfall gaugesCoverage and update times vary by source and location. Sewage reports indicate discharge activity, not a water-quality or swimming-safety test. About our data
Look ahead
Compare different views of what your river could do next. Understand the direction, the uncertainty, and where the models disagree.
A range of outcomes helps show uncertainty. A prediction is an estimate, never a guarantee.
Our ML Outlook model estimates level changes using recent readings, rainfall and neighbouring station signals.
A second view of flood probability, risk and river-level projections, helping you compare the outlook.
Brings soil moisture, groundwater, river flow and catchment characteristics into an experimental outlook.
Available at supported stations. Nimbus is under evaluation. Use model estimates alongside current readings and official flood warnings.
Go a little deeper
Follow a wave. Compare a pair of gauges. Find out what happened last time. Pick the question you want to explore.
Spot the rivers rising fastest and see what has changed since yesterday.
See what changedFollow upstream peaks and explore estimated travel times between connected gauges.
Follow a flood wavePut river-level charts together to see how upstream and downstream gauges respond.
Compare stationsExplore connected rivers alongside rainfall, soil moisture, groundwater and overflow signals where available.
Explore a catchmentFollow the reservoirs that supply our tap water, with published levels and historical trends.
Check reservoir levelsExplore recorded flood outlines and discover where water has reached before.
Explore recorded floodsLog a flood you experienced and investigate the rain, rivers and warnings around that event.
Explore My EventsReplay recorded floods or explore an illustrative rain scenario on an animated river network.
Open replay & simulationGo from a number to an understanding
Explore a real storm, compare its fingerprint, look beneath the ground and check what a prediction got right.
The Met Office issued a red rain warning on 18 October. As the storm unfolded, the Derwent rose at Matlock, then reached its recorded peak downstream at Church Wilne.
Each trace is scaled to its own peak in this event. Gauge heights use local datums. Gaps in the recorded data remain gaps.
An observed delay in this event, rather than an arrival-time forecast for the next one.
Severe EA warnings were recorded around Derby on the morning of 21 October. Church Wilne’s recorded peak followed at 12:45 UTC.
Regional rainfall context: daily totals at Dore.
Sources: FloodRadar’s EA observation archive, Matlock recorded readings, Met Office warning, 18 October. Weather warnings and EA river flood warnings are different signals.
A storm leaves a pattern across the river network. Compare the same gauges in two recorded storms, then see how rainfall and river responses agree—or differ.
29 shared gauges, compared in the same order.
A resemblance score is not a probability of flooding. Fewer than 12 shared gauges means there is no score.
Uses FloodRadar’s existing similarity calculation and published fingerprint index, built 10 July 2026. Colours show each peak as a percentage of the reference record used by that archive.
Rain falling onto already wet ground can behave very differently. Change the rainfall and starting wetness to explore why FloodRadar looks beyond the river itself.
Less water can soak into the soil, so more may move over the surface towards drains and rivers.
This simplified illustration explains a mechanism. It does not calculate a flood level, represent measured soil saturation or predict a sewage discharge. Explore the actual catchment signals and monitoring sources.
Compare earlier ML Outlook forecasts with the readings that followed at A6 Bridge on the River Brock. Change the lead time to see where the predictions stayed close and where they missed.
The shaded spread, when enabled, shows different earlier forecasts for the same hour. It is not a calibrated confidence interval; historical intervals are unavailable in this public extract.
24 matched hourly checks · 3-hour lead time
A dated sample of one station and six lead times. It is not a site-wide accuracy rating.
Each value was forecast before its target time. Observations are matched within 30 minutes. Missing readings are excluded.
At each of 24 hourly checkpoints, we retain the forecast whose target is closest to the start of that hour for each lead time. We pair it with the nearest recorded observation within 30 minutes, then calculate the absolute difference. Mean absolute error is the average of those differences for the selected lead time.
This is a recorded example from one river during one day. Performance can differ during rapid rises, at other stations and over longer lead times. The full spread compares forecasts issued at different times; it does not describe a probability distribution.
Sources: public prediction history and EA gauge readings via FloodRadar. Extract captured 5 September 2026. Predictions provide context alongside official warnings.
Property flood-risk reports
Buying, renting, or simply understanding your own home?
Bring flood-risk information and local history into one readable report. Start with a postcode, explore the free preview, then decide whether to unlock the full report.
Full risk layers cover England; Scotland and Wales have river-gauge sections only. Coverage varies. A report is not a property survey or insurance assessment.
Open a chapter to see the questions it answers, then explore the full sample for York, YO1 9QL.
FloodRadarSAMPLEYO1 9QL · York
Sample postcode report
Understand the official long-term likelihood bands for rivers and the sea, with surface-water mapping alongside them.
This is a walkthrough of the existing sample report. Individual reports depend on the data available for the chosen location.
From the rain in the hills to the water below your feet.
The spill figure is an annual reported total, not the number of discharges happening now. The forecast pairs belong to the dated example on Why FloodRadar; they are not a site-wide accuracy count.
Sources: river connections, storm index, annual sewage statistics, forecast comparison & method. Snapshot: 5 September 2026.
7 input families in Nimbus. Each becomes numerical features that help the model recognise patterns. These are the ingredients behind a prediction:
Eris uses 14 individual features, including rates of rise, time spent at elevated levels, observed rainfall and an upstream signal. The models use different inputs; coverage varies by location. More inputs do not guarantee a better forecast.
Explore the three modelsPublic-site coverage snapshot: 5 September 2026. These figures describe our datasets and model capabilities, rather than the number of sensors reporting at this instant. Refresh intervals and availability vary by feed.
¹ The groundwater explorer showed 665 of 3,610 boreholes with coordinates and a reading in the preceding 30 days. The rainfall catalogue contained 2,060 gauges; 1,065 appeared in its current feed.
The sewage map includes both live-feed and annual-report coverage. A listed site does not mean a discharge is happening. ² The 91M+ readings figure is the previously published rounded archive total, not a new count.
Our mapping also draws on approximately 31,700 recorded flood outlines and 141,000 flood-defence line assets. Explore the datasets, licences and coverage.
Explore the maps that put today’s water levels in context.
Trace where water was recorded in past events, with history stretching back to 1946.
Explore the flood archive ↗See the engineered landscape around rivers. A mapped defence does not guarantee protection.
Explore the defence dataset ↗Discover land designed to hold water and help manage its movement through the landscape.
Explore the storage dataset ↗Approximate dataset sizes, checked 5 September 2026. These illustrations are schematic; they show no specific property or risk boundary. Sources, licences and coverage.
Make it local
Your home. Your family’s street. The river you walk beside.
Explore the map and get to know your nearby rivers and monitoring stations.
Find nearby stationsSave stations to My Data and keep the readings that matter in one place.
Explore My DataSet your alerts and check the latest outlook when conditions begin to change.
Set up your alertsBring together your nearby rivers, local warnings and the outlook for the places that matter to you.
Read the story behind FloodRadarFloodRadar is an independent service. Always follow official flood warnings and local emergency advice. Find flood help and preparation guidance.
About FloodRadar · Our story
We were flooded. So we set out to understand why.
If you’ve been flooded, you don’t need it described. The water comes up through the floor and the doorways at once. Then come the months that nobody photographs: the drying, the stripping-out, the forms, the smell, and the small lurch in your stomach every time it starts to rain.
When the worst had passed, we were left with one question: why here, and why then? The rain that flooded us had mostly fallen somewhere else, on hills miles upstream, hours earlier. The river had carried it to our door. We wanted to understand how those events connected.
So we started reading. The Environment Agency publishes a remarkable amount of open data: river gauges, rainfall records and flood histories. We taught ourselves to read the river, and FloodRadar is what we built to make that clearer for everyone else, too.
It began with our own home. It grew into a way to share what the data shows, and help other people understand the water around the places they care about.
FloodRadar is an independent service, adding context, history and experimental insights to the official picture. Official flood warnings and local emergency advice always take precedence. Our models and alerts support your understanding; they do not replace that advice.
Sign up for official flood warnings (opens in a new tab), check current warnings, or read our flood preparation guidance. If there is an immediate risk to life, call 999.
