Chess Stream — monitoring and records

The monitoring network on this water

Hydrionis holds 868 values from 2 gauges on this water. Discharge is a property of a gauge and its reach, not of this water as a whole, so this page reports the network and its records rather than a single figure.

Gauges

868

Values held

1964–2025

Record spans

Gauges on the Chess Stream

2 monitoring points, positioned as the publisher records them.

The seasonal shape

An annual mean says how much water a river carried. A monthly record says when — and on most rivers the difference between a wet winter and a dry summer is larger than the difference between one year and the next.

Monthly mean flow at Chess Stream at Chessbridge

Each month's mean discharge as the publisher computed it, which shows the seasonal shape an annual mean flattens away. 1964–2025.

Show relevant events (4 events)Shading marks when something was recorded, not what caused the line.

Taken as the publisher computes it rather than recomputed by Hydrionis from daily values: the publisher knows which of its readings passed validation. Months the gauge did not cover are absent rather than interpolated, and the line breaks where they fall.

What the shaded periods are (4 events)

A shaded period marks when something was recorded, not what caused the shape of the line. Where the two coincide, they coincided.

Documented record — A documented event, compiled from cited sources after it happened. The dates are as good as the record, which for older events can mean the month rather than the day.

Event	Type	Period	Standing	Authority
The 1976 drought	Drought declaration	1975-05-01 – 1976-08-31	Documented record	Compiled record
Yorkshire drought	Drought declaration	1995-04-01 – 1996-03-31	Documented record	Compiled record
The 2022 drought	Drought declaration	2022-03-01 – 2022-10-31	Documented record	Compiled record
European drought	Drought declaration	2022-05-01 – 2022-10-31	Documented record	Compiled record

Not shown on this chart

Cantareira water crisis, São Paulo — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.
Cape Town Day Zero — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.
Hurricane Katrina water and sanitation collapse — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.

View the data behind this chart

Underlying data
Period	Chess Stream at Chessbridge (m³/s)
1964	0.611
1965	0.808
1966	0.546
1967	0.635
1968	0.639
1969	0.754
1970	0.766
1971	0.762
1972	0.416
1973	0.210
1974	0.484
1975	1.17
1976	0.152
1977	0.876
1978	0.919
1979	0.571
1980	0.713
1981	0.285
1982	0.268
1983	0.143
1984	0.659
1985	0.588
1986	1.00
1987	0.284
1988	1.24
1989	0.089
1990	0.642
1991	0.606
1992	0.108
1993	0.850
1994	0.916
1995	1.28
1996	0.214
1997	0.104
1998	1.00
1999	0.852
2000	0.296
2001	1.20
2002	0.525
2003	0.961
2004	0.230
2005	0.167
2006	0.127
2007	0.377
2008	0.730
2009	0.698
2010	0.704
2011	0.732
2012	0.260
2013	0.610
2014	1.23
2015	0.705
2016	1.30
2017	0.318
2018	0.542
2019	0.187
2020	0.556
2021	0.552
2023	0.809
2024	0.813
2025	0.747

About this series

Everything below is a property of the data rather than a rating of it. There is deliberately no single confidence score: how much a gap matters depends on what you are about to do with the series, and only you know that.

Source	Environment Agency — Hydrology Data Explorer API · Open Government Licence v3.0
How the values came to exist	Measured
Period held	1964–2025
Completeness	98.4% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	One period inside 1964–2025 holds no value: 2022. It is drawn as a break in the line and is never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1964 and is not continuous from it: 62 years separate the first value from the last, and 98% of the years between them are held. The span is not the record.
Last read from the publisher	2026-08-24
Redistribution	Permitted by the upstream licences
Commercial reuse	Permitted by the upstream licences. No Hydrionis access tier can widen this.
Methodology	How this was produced

Every gauge Hydrionis holds here

Gauges on the Chess Stream and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
Chess Stream at Chessbridge	mean river flow, mean monthly river flow	698	1964–2025
CHESS STREAM	ept family richness, life flow index (family level), proportion of sediment-sensitive invertebrates, whpt average score per taxon, whpt number of scoring taxa	170	1989–2022

How these gauges were attached to this water

Named by the publisher Each gauge here names this water in the publisher’s own station record. Hydrionis has not inferred the connection from station names.

What each gauge’s link to this water rests on
Gauge	Evidence	Established
Chess Stream at Chessbridge	Stated by the publisher — Environment Agency hydrology station register, riverName field — https://environment.data.gov.uk/hydrology/id/stations	2026-08-26
CHESS STREAM	Stated by the publisher on the record this gauge’s observations came from.	With the observations

What this record holds

Hydrionis decides which waters get a page, and which of those are offered to search, from what is actually held rather than from how the page reads. Five signals are counted; this record has 3 of them, which makes it a full profile.

Information-gain signals held for this water body
Signal	Held	Counts
Gauges holding a real record	2	no
Years spanned	62	yes, 20 or more
Values held	868	no
Distinct measurements	7	yes, 2 or more
Publishers measuring it	2	yes, 2 or more
Official identifiers	1	recorded, not counted

Use this data

Machine-readable JSON /api/v1/observations/by-subject/gauge-ea-e6eae01c-0f7d-4748-b8f1-ee199284b543.json
How to cite this, and who you must credit
How these figures were produced
Request this at a different scale, format or geography

No bulk download is offered here, which is a licence position rather than a product one: at least one contributing publisher does not permit redistribution. The values can be read on the page, cited, and pointed to at source.

Attribution and citation

Attribution you are required to give

These are conditions of the licences the underlying data is published under. They are obligations to the publishers, not to Hydrionis, and they apply to you directly whether or not you mention Hydrionis at all.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Environment Agency — Open Government Licence v3.0 (licence text)

Suggested citation for Hydrionis

Hydrionis (2026), Chess Stream gauge records, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/waters/england-chess-stream/

Cite Hydrionis where you rely on the compilation, the normalisation, the eligibility judgements or a chart. Where you use an unmodified published value, the publisher’s attribution is the one that is required; crediting Hydrionis as well is welcome and is not something Hydrionis can require of you.

Recommended, not required. Hydrionis does not claim rights over unmodified public data it relayed, and doing arithmetic on somebody else’s measurements does not make them Hydrionis’s. Cite the version and the access date: the Chess Stream gauge records changes as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without both cannot be checked later. Full guidance is on cite and reuse.

Where these figures come from

Spatially aggregatedHigh confidence2020

Source: EA — Hydrology Data Explorer API, EA measure e6eae01c-0f7d-4748-b8f1-ee199284b543-flow-m-86400-m3s-qualified. Licence: Open — attribution required (attribution required).

Method: Mean of the twelve monthly means for the year. Computed from months rather than from daily readings directly, so that a year with uneven observation is not weighted toward its best-observed months. Years with any month missing are not published.

Aggregated by Hydrionis from daily mean flow published by the Environment Agency under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Retrieved 24 August 2026.