Germany Federal Waterway Monitoring Dataset

25,835

Observations

829

Series

744

Subjects

2026–2026

Period covered

Methodology

Ingested 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 ingestion unions its window with what is already held, and the record deepens prospectively rather than sliding forward.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Read before relying on these figures

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 ingestion 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 ingested 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.

Coverage

Subjects	German federal waterway gauges reporting level or discharge — 744 held
Period	2026–2026
Units	m, m³/s
Update cadence	Daily
Identifier	`germany-river-monitoring` v1.0.0

Fields

Data dictionary →

Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.

Identifier	Field	Unit	Reported at
`river-level`	River level Height of the water surface at a gauging station, measured against that station’s own zero point.	m	river-gauge
`river-flow-mean`	Mean river flow Average volumetric discharge past a gauging station over a stated period.	m³/s	river-gauge

Rights and access

Licence position

Open. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.

Permitted uses

Public display
Derived analysis
API delivery
Bulk download
Commercial use

Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.

Contributing sources

Wasserstraßen- und Schifffahrtsverwaltung des Bundes — PEGELONLINE — German federal waterway gauges (Datenlizenz Deutschland – Zero – Version 2.0 (DL-DE→Zero-2.0))

Suggested citation

Hydrionis (2026), Germany Federal Waterway Monitoring Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/germany-river-monitoring/

Cite the version. Hydrionis datasets change as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without a version cannot be checked later.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-25

First release. Germany becomes a monitored jurisdiction.

Additions

Daily mean water level and discharge for the federal waterway network.

Getting the data

river-flow observations from PEGELONLINE (WSV) (27,695 rows) (CSV)

Machine-readable metadata for this dataset is at /api/v1/datasets/germany-river-monitoring.json. For bulk extracts, higher-volume access or commercial licensing, see data enquiries.