The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 357 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

357

Values held

1896–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Lower Catawba 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 CATAWBA RIVER NEAR ROCK HILL, SC

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1896–2025.

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	CATAWBA RIVER NEAR ROCK HILL, SC (m³/s)
1896	2,025
1897	1,940
1899	2,690
1901	4,276
1903	2,656
1942	733
1943	1,589
1944	855
1945	2,175
1946	1,303
1947	1,113
1948	1,113
1949	668
1951	385
1952	1,589
1953	1,102
1954	1,444
1955	402
1956	413
1957	1,022
1958	1,416
1960	1,416
1961	603
1962	1,402
1963	745
1964	1,062
1966	425
1967	1,110
1968	425
1969	422
1970	436
1971	878
1972	680
1973	957
1974	714
1975	1,767
1976	379
1977	1,104
1979	1,226
1980	597
1981	377
1982	861
1983	796
1984	932
1985	385
1987	971
1988	382
1989	419
1992	767
1993	1,184
1994	966
1995	631
1996	736
1997	674
1998	464
1999	382
2000	362
2001	317
2002	280
2003	1,424
2004	1,540
2005	433
2007	620
2008	513
2009	436
2010	937
2011	416
2013	1,373
2015	442
2017	445
2018	779
2019	2,078
2020	1,651
2022	365
2023	510
2024	3,115
2025	459

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	1896–2025
Completeness	59.2% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	15 separate periods inside 1896–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1904 to 1941 — 38 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1896 and is not continuous from it: 130 years separate the first value from the last, and 59% 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 CATAWBA RIVER NEAR ROCK HILL, SC, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1896–2025.

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	CATAWBA RIVER NEAR ROCK HILL, SC (mm)
1896	370
1897	507
1898	590
1899	758
1900	605
1901	1,160
1943	452
1944	469
1945	476
1946	496
1947	451
1948	574
1949	645
1950	402
1951	323
1952	471
1953	349
1954	337
1955	242
1956	281
1957	531
1958	516
1959	529
1960	639
1961	514
1962	442
1963	331
1964	599
1965	536
1966	392
1967	358
1968	423
1969	481
1970	425
1971	554
1972	531
1973	658
1974	616
1975	769
1976	517
1977	505
1978	525
1979	744
1980	498
1981	249
1982	440
1983	609
1984	585
1985	379
1986	251
1987	469
1988	205
1989	535
1990	549
1991	492
1992	551
1993	562
1994	494
1996	481
1997	434
1998	484
1999	220
2000	203
2001	141
2002	153
2003	706
2004	453
2005	431
2006	311
2007	249
2008	182
2009	413
2010	396
2011	251
2012	240
2013	616
2014	394
2015	405
2016	345
2017	310
2018	690
2019	622
2020	854
2021	451
2022	374
2023	373
2024	572
2025	312

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	1896–2025
Completeness	67.7% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	2 separate periods inside 1896–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1902 to 1942 — 41 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1896 and is not continuous from it: 130 years separate the first value from the last, and 68% 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 Lower Catawba and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
CATAWBA RIVER NEAR ROCK HILL, SC	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	214	1896–2026
LITTLE SUGAR CREEK NEAR CHARLOTTE, NC SITE 55	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	143	1925–2026

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 — 03050103. 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
CATAWBA RIVER NEAR ROCK HILL, SC	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
LITTLE SUGAR CREEK NEAR CHARLOTTE, NC SITE 55	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	131	yes, 20 or more
Values held	357	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-02146000.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), Lower Catawba gauge records, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-lower-catawba/

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 Lower Catawba 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 02146000, 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.