The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 350 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

350

Values held

1867–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Lower French Broad 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 LITTLE PIGEON RIVER AT SEVIERVILLE, TN

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1867–2025.

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	LITTLE PIGEON RIVER AT SEVIERVILLE, TN (m³/s)
1867	1,218
1875	1,557
1896	1,303
1913	680
1917	765
1920	1,048
1921	445
1922	250
1924	197
1926	180
1927	289
1928	906
1929	629
1930	150
1931	257
1932	328
1933	510
1934	294
1935	337
1936	629
1937	248
1938	535
1939	255
1940	248
1941	111
1942	215
1944	282
1945	306
1946	470
1947	665
1948	379
1949	490
1951	578
1952	286
1953	377
1954	413
1955	263
1956	578
1957	801
1959	538
1961	609
1963	1,045
1964	731
1965	1,161
1966	949
1967	436
1969	413
1971	541
1972	214
1973	1,082
1974	357
1975	547
1976	235
1977	705
1978	408
1979	657
1980	462
1981	180
1982	425
2013	651
2014	479
2016	317
2017	262
2018	365
2019	799
2020	906
2021	521
2022	504
2023	379
2024	623
2025	317

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	1867–2025
Completeness	44.7% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	16 separate periods inside 1867–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1983 to 2012 — 30 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1867 and is not continuous from it: 159 years separate the first value from the last, and 45% 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 LITTLE PIGEON RIVER AT SEVIERVILLE, TN, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1921–2025.

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	LITTLE PIGEON RIVER AT SEVIERVILLE, TN (mm)
1921	631
1922	739
1923	667
1924	502
1925	314
1926	560
1927	619
1928	707
1929	728
1930	388
1931	464
1932	655
1933	442
1934	465
1935	553
1936	688
1937	538
1938	585
1939	410
1940	367
1941	267
1942	518
1943	468
1944	474
1945	561
1946	560
1947	479
1948	538
1949	648
1950	564
1951	609
1952	404
1953	454
1954	479
1955	460
1956	566
1957	821
1958	525
1959	655
1960	469
1961	672
1962	635
1963	565
1964	651
1965	505
1966	589
1967	678
1968	424
1969	448
1970	407
1971	657
1972	830
1973	720
1974	795
1975	650
1976	483
1977	636
1978	504
1979	680
1980	446
1981	456
2013	982
2014	482
2016	411
2017	479
2018	786
2019	857
2020	942
2021	683
2022	680
2023	559
2024	669
2025	529

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	1921–2025
Completeness	69.5% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	2 separate periods inside 1921–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1982 to 2012 — 31 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1921 and is not continuous from it: 105 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	2026-08-24
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 French Broad and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
LITTLE PIGEON RIVER AT SEVIERVILLE, TN	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	190	1867–2026
FRENCH BROAD RIVER BELOW DOUGLAS DAM, TN	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	160	1901–2026

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 — 06010107. 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
LITTLE PIGEON RIVER AT SEVIERVILLE, 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
FRENCH BROAD RIVER BELOW DOUGLAS DAM, 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

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	160	yes, 20 or more
Values held	350	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-03470000.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 French Broad gauge records, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-lower-french-broad/

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 French Broad 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 confidence2025-02-13

Source: USGS — National Water Information System, USGS site 03470000, 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.