The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 366 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

366

Values held

1890–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Kentucky Lake 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 SANDY RIVER AT BRUCETON, TN

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1930–2025.

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 SANDY RIVER AT BRUCETON, TN (m³/s)
1930	258
1931	58.3
1932	221
1933	91.2
1935	481
1936	191
1937	391
1938	121
1939	168
1940	47.6
1941	34.0
1942	286
1943	107
1944	151
1945	159
1946	340
1947	113
1948	174
1949	280
1951	148
1953	142
1954	94.0
1955	155
1956	334
1957	146
1959	68.0
1961	107
1962	212
1963	77.6
1964	87.8
1965	203
1966	54.4
1967	257
1968	87.2
1970	123
1971	144
1972	340
1973	216
1974	244
1975	357
1976	83.3
1977	98.0
1978	74.2
1979	267
1981	110
1982	111
1984	142
1986	36.5
2002	259
2004	67.4
2005	62.3
2006	166
2007	51.8
2008	87.5
2009	360
2011	186
2013	95.1
2014	176
2015	161
2016	152
2017	128
2019	274
2021	186
2022	92.6
2023	59.5
2024	51.3
2025	331

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	1930–2025
Completeness	69.8% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	15 separate periods inside 1930–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1987 to 2001 — 15 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1930 and is not continuous from it: 96 years separate the first value from the last, and 70% 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 TENNESSEE RIVER NEAR PADUCAH, KY, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1890–1983.

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 (0 events)

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	TENNESSEE RIVER NEAR PADUCAH, KY (mm)
1890	626
1891	692
1892	649
1893	568
1894	378
1895	411
1896	426
1897	581
1898	418
1899	605
1900	521
1901	605
1902	563
1903	575
1904	274
1905	464
1906	594
1907	513
1908	519
1909	670
1910	416
1911	546
1912	666
1913	558
1914	330
1915	520
1916	564
1917	644
1918	499
1919	644
1920	769
1921	519
1922	672
1923	675
1924	557
1925	324
1926	448
1927	680
1928	634
1929	804
1930	378
1931	359
1932	713
1933	618
1934	434
1935	556
1936	566
1937	617
1938	507
1939	547
1940	361
1941	268
1942	395
1943	489
1944	535
1945	601
1946	688
1947	525
1948	660
1949	729
1950	786
1951	697
1952	488
1953	505
1954	418
1955	517
1956	515
1957	775
1958	535
1959	477
1960	494
1961	638
1962	698
1963	500
1964	673
1965	549
1966	413
1967	576
1968	459
1969	427
1970	484
1971	524
1972	640
1973	810
1974	745
1975	754
1976	439
1977	599
1978	473
1979	778
1980	529
1981	306
1982	584
1983	635

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	1890–1983
Completeness	100.0% of the periods in that span are held.
Continuity	Continuous: every year from 1890 to 1983 is held.
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 Kentucky Lake and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
BIG SANDY RIVER AT BRUCETON, TN	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	195	1930–2026
TENNESSEE RIVER NEAR PADUCAH, KY	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	171	1890–2026

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 — 06040005. 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 SANDY RIVER AT BRUCETON, TN	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
TENNESSEE RIVER NEAR PADUCAH, KY	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	137	yes, 20 or more
Values held	366	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-03606500.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), Kentucky Lake gauge records, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-kentucky-lake/

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 Kentucky Lake 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 confidence2025-04-06

Source: USGS — National Water Information System, USGS site 03606500, 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.