{"id":"germany-river-monitoring","slug":"germany-river-monitoring","name":"Germany Federal Waterway Monitoring Dataset","description":"Daily mean water level and discharge for the gauging network on Germany’s federal waterways — the Rhine, Elbe, Danube, Weser, Neckar, Mosel, Main and the canal system — accumulated from a publisher that retains only a rolling month.","methodology":"Collected from the PEGELONLINE REST service operated by the German Waterways and Shipping Administration. Gauges measure every fifteen minutes; Hydrionis stores the daily mean and refuses any day with fewer than 72 of the expected 96 readings rather than averaging a partial day. Water level is converted from centimetres to metres and remains referenced to each station’s own zero point, not to a national datum. The service returns roughly thirty-one days of measurement however much history is requested, so this dataset is built under the accumulate update mode: each collection run adds its window to with what is already held, and the record deepens prospectively rather than sliding forward.","domains":["river-flow"],"metricIds":["river-level","river-flow-mean"],"subjectScope":"German federal waterway gauges reporting level or discharge","cadence":"daily","version":"1.0.0","released":"2026-08-25","changelog":[{"version":"1.0.0","date":"2026-08-25","summary":"First release. Germany becomes a monitored jurisdiction.","additions":["Daily mean water level and discharge for the federal waterway network."]}],"limitations":["This is not a historical archive and does not claim to be one. PEGELONLINE keeps about a month of measurement and discards the rest, so Hydrionis began with roughly one month per gauge. The record grows with each collection run rather than reaching backwards, and the earliest date held is the date Hydrionis first read the service — not the date the gauge was installed.","Water level is measured against each station’s own Pegelnullpunkt, a local reference. Two gauges reading three metres are not at the same height, and a level is not a depth of water. Read a level against that gauge’s own record and never against another gauge’s.","The network covers federal waterways only — navigable rivers and canals managed by the Waterways and Shipping Administration. The Länder operate much larger hydrological networks with far deeper records; the Bavarian service alone reaches back decades. Those are registered and not collected because their bulk download requires accepting terms through a form.","Coastal and estuarine stations on the North Sea and Baltic are tide gauges. A daily mean at one of those is a mean across tidal cycles, not a river stage."],"observationCount":50982,"seriesCount":832,"subjectCount":745,"from":2026,"to":2026,"sourceIds":["de-pegelonline"],"units":["m","m³/s"],"redistributable":true,"commerciallyReusable":true,"citation":"Hydrionis (2026), Germany Federal Waterway Monitoring Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/germany-river-monitoring/","downloads":[{"file":"/downloads/observations-river-flow-de-pegelonline.csv","format":"CSV","label":"river-flow observations from PEGELONLINE (WSV) (52,842 rows)"}],"apiPath":"/api/v1/datasets/germany-river-monitoring.json","lastFetched":"2026-10-01","fields":[{"id":"river-level","name":"River level","definition":"Height of the water surface at a gauging station, measured against that station’s own zero point.","unit":"m","nativeGeography":["river-gauge"],"comparabilityNotes":"Level is measured against each station’s own zero point, which is set locally and is not a common datum. Two gauges reading 3 m are not at the same height, and a level is not a depth of water: it says where the surface sits relative to a reference, not how deep the river is. Read a level against that gauge’s own record, never against another gauge’s."},{"id":"river-flow-mean","name":"Mean river flow","definition":"Average volumetric discharge past a gauging station over a stated period.","unit":"m³/s","nativeGeography":["river-gauge"],"comparabilityNotes":"Flow is a property of a specific gauge on a specific reach, and cannot be attributed to a river as a whole. Two gauges on the same river can differ by an order of magnitude. Where a station measures flow through a sluice, lock or pumping station — much of the Dutch network does — discharge is signed and a negative value means water moving in the reverse direction, which is a real operating state and not an error. Managed flow of that kind is not comparable with discharge at a natural gauging station, because it reflects operational decisions as well as hydrology."}]}