The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 380 values from 2 gauges within it. Discharge is a property of a gauge and its reach, not of this drainage area, so this page reports the network and its records rather than a single figure.

Gauges

380

Values held

1909–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Coal huc8 subbasin

2 monitoring points, positioned as the publisher records them.

Flood peaks, as measured

This gauge's flood record, as measured. Unlike a daily mean it is the discharge at the moment the river was highest, which is the figure flood frequency analysis is built on.

Largest measured flow of each year at BIG COAL RIVER AT ASHFORD, WV

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1909–2025.

Show relevant events (1 event)Shading marks when something was recorded, not what caused the line.

Published by the gauge's own operator from its sub-daily record; Hydrionis stores the figure rather than recomputing it. A year the gauge did not cover produces no value rather than a low one, and the gaps are stated below the chart. A peak is a property of this gauge and its reach: a larger flood upstream or downstream of it is not in this series.

What the shaded periods are (1 event)

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
Hurricane Katrina water and sanitation collapse	Flood	2005-08-29 – 2005-09-30	Documented record	Compiled record

Not shown on this chart

The 1976 drought — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.
The 2022 drought — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.
Yorkshire drought — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.
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.
European drought — 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	BIG COAL RIVER AT ASHFORD, WV (m³/s)
1909	247
1910	217
1911	300
1912	205
1913	309
1914	163
1915	205
1916	1,014
1931	194
1932	430
1933	239
1934	377
1935	411
1936	504
1937	240
1939	702
1940	140
1941	191
1942	240
1944	334
1945	215
1946	402
1947	124
1948	379
1950	377
1951	368
1952	260
1953	139
1954	123
1955	374
1956	348
1957	518
1958	238
1959	188
1960	155
1961	245
1962	558
1963	702
1964	153
1965	289
1966	103
1967	753
1968	258
1969	158
1971	205
1972	586
1973	351
1974	549
1975	270
1976	168
1977	648
1978	711
1980	456
1981	236
1982	300
1983	195
1984	245
1985	263
1987	484
1989	218
1991	286
1993	374
1994	394
1995	195
1996	504
1997	391
1998	180
1999	134
2000	150
2001	462
2002	239
2003	422
2005	157
2006	170
2007	691
2008	133
2009	337
2010	419
2011	175
2012	272
2013	251
2015	597
2016	181
2017	385
2018	289
2020	248
2021	578
2022	195
2023	388
2024	303
2025	513

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	United States Geological Survey — National Water Information System · US Government work — public domain
How the values came to exist	Measured
Period held	1909–2025
Completeness	77.8% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	13 separate periods inside 1909–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1917 to 1930 — 14 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1909 and is not continuous from it: 117 years separate the first value from the last, and 78% of the years between them are held. The span is not the record.
Last read from the publisher	2026-08-31
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

How much of the rain came back out

A discharge in cubic metres per second cannot be compared with anything: the larger number may only mean the larger catchment. Divided by the area draining to the gauge it becomes a depth of water over that land, which answers a question a reader already has — of the rain that fell here, how much came back out as river?

Water leaving the catchment above BIG COAL RIVER AT ASHFORD, WV, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1909–2025.

Show relevant events (1 event)Shading marks when something was recorded, not what caused the line.

Computed by Hydrionis from the published annual mean flow and the catchment area the station's own publisher states. It is not a water balance: the difference between rainfall and runoff is not evaporation alone but also change in groundwater storage, water abstracted and taken elsewhere, and water imported by transfer schemes — which is why a catchment can yield more runoff than the rain that fell on it without anything being measured wrongly. A different area figure rescales every value here by the ratio between them.

What the shaded periods are (1 event)

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
Hurricane Katrina water and sanitation collapse	Flood	2005-08-29 – 2005-09-30	Documented record	Compiled record

Not shown on this chart

The 1976 drought — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.
The 2022 drought — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.
Yorkshire drought — This event’s area does not contain this chart’s subject. Sharing a country is not sharing an event, so it is not drawn.
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.
European drought — 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	BIG COAL RIVER AT ASHFORD, WV (mm)
1909	393
1910	367
1911	451
1912	473
1913	428
1914	426
1915	484
1931	345
1932	592
1933	501
1934	325
1935	555
1936	410
1937	507
1938	496
1939	402
1940	254
1941	184
1942	476
1943	429
1944	416
1945	530
1946	318
1947	265
1948	487
1949	452
1950	682
1951	588
1952	479
1953	356
1954	338
1955	526
1956	502
1957	470
1958	616
1959	342
1960	327
1961	536
1962	604
1963	396
1964	373
1965	335
1966	318
1967	565
1968	412
1969	378
1970	352
1971	500
1972	764
1973	536
1974	635
1975	635
1976	370
1977	417
1978	539
1979	771
1980	522
1981	379
1982	481
1983	405
1984	475
1985	457
1986	455
1987	453
1988	222
1989	707
1990	474
1991	512
1992	410
1993	486
1994	680
1995	420
1996	687
1997	420
1998	506
1999	280
2000	347
2001	452
2002	463
2003	817
2004	682
2005	427
2006	353
2007	364
2008	386
2009	540
2010	496
2011	526
2012	485
2013	467
2014	448
2015	612
2016	454
2017	568
2018	715
2019	508
2020	687
2021	441
2022	453
2023	336
2024	362
2025	473

About this series

Source	United States Geological Survey — National Water Information System · US Government work — public domain
How the values came to exist	Derived Computed by Hydrionis
Period held	1909–2025
Completeness	87.2% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	One period inside 1909–2025 holds no value: 1916 to 1930, 15 years with no reading. It is drawn as a break in the line and is never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1909 and is not continuous from it: 117 years separate the first value from the last, and 87% 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 within this area

Gauges within the Coal and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
BIG COAL RIVER AT ASHFORD, WV	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	241	1909–2026
COAL RIVER AT TORNADO, WV	catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	139	1909–2026

How these gauges were attached to this water

Assigned by the publisher to a numbered basin Every gauge here is assigned to this drainage area by its own publisher, which issues the area an official code — 05050009. A drainage area is not a river: it contains the tributaries as well as the main channel, and a gauge in it may be on any of them.

What each gauge’s link to this water rests on
Gauge	Evidence	Established
BIG COAL RIVER AT ASHFORD, WV	Stated by the publisher — USGS site service, huc_cd field — https://waterservices.usgs.gov/nwis/site/ ; named from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset 8-digit HU (Subbasin) layer — https://hydro.nationalmap.gov/arcgis/rest/services/wbd/MapServer/4	2026-08-26
COAL RIVER AT TORNADO, WV	Stated by the publisher — USGS site service, huc_cd field — https://waterservices.usgs.gov/nwis/site/ ; named from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset 8-digit HU (Subbasin) layer — https://hydro.nationalmap.gov/arcgis/rest/services/wbd/MapServer/4	2026-08-26

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	118	yes, 20 or more
Values held	380	no
Distinct measurements	4	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-usgs-03198500.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

Suggested citation for Hydrionis

Hydrionis (2026), Coal gauge records, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-coal/

Cite Hydrionis where you rely on values Hydrionis computed, on the method that produced them, or on the compilation itself. The underlying measurements remain the publishers’ and their attribution requirements apply to you directly.

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 Coal 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.

None of the contributing licences requires attribution. Crediting the publishers is still good practice and they are listed above.

Where these figures come from

MeasuredHigh confidence2025-02-16

Source: USGS — National Water Information System, USGS site 03198500, annual peak streamflow. Licence: Open.

Method: The instantaneous maximum discharge of each water year as published by USGS, dated to the day it occurred. One value per October-to-September water year; where the publisher lists both a systematic and a historic peak for a year, the larger is the annual maximum. Values the publisher marks as maximum daily averages are not held here, because they are not instantaneous peaks. Values marked as bounded rather than measured are held as censored observations carrying the bound. Cubic feet per second are converted to cubic metres per second and the publisher unit is recorded alongside.

Rating curves are extrapolated at extreme discharges, so the largest values in a peak series carry the largest measurement uncertainty. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey National Water Information System, a work of the United States government and therefore in the public domain.

Retrieved 31 August 2026.