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

1913–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Lower Ohio 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 CACHE RIVER AT FORMAN, IL

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1923–2025.

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	CACHE RIVER AT FORMAN, IL (m³/s)
1923	110
1925	29.4
1927	230
1929	253
1930	131
1931	46.2
1932	61.7
1933	194
1934	26.9
1935	273
1936	78.7
1937	244
1938	92.3
1939	122
1940	50.1
1941	32.3
1942	101
1943	222
1944	139
1945	217
1946	86.4
1947	51.8
1948	118
1949	167
1950	251
1951	114
1952	142
1953	41.9
1954	42.5
1955	92.3
1956	53.8
1957	234
1958	145
1959	116
1961	188
1962	122
1963	103
1964	228
1965	74.2
1966	69.7
1967	48.4
1968	60.3
1969	187
1970	113
1971	72.5
1972	148
1973	175
1975	162
1976	60.6
1977	203
1978	86.9
1979	182
1980	47.0
1981	55.5
1982	206
1983	57.8
1985	157
1986	134
1987	46.7
1989	144
1990	82.7
1991	52.7
1993	70.8
1995	99.1
1996	125
1997	135
1998	62.3
1999	129
2000	79.9
2001	36.0
2003	83.5
2004	74.5
2005	105
2006	185
2007	121
2008	578
2009	84.4
2010	100
2011	337
2013	89.5
2015	109
2017	317
2018	177
2019	90.0
2020	144
2021	102
2022	118
2023	109
2024	78.2
2025	247

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	1923–2025
Completeness	87.4% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	13 separate periods inside 1923–2025 hold no value. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1923 and is not continuous from it: 103 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	2026-08-31
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 CACHE RIVER AT FORMAN, IL, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1923–2025.

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	CACHE RIVER AT FORMAN, IL (mm)
1923	706
1925	318
1926	186
1927	1,243
1928	553
1929	738
1930	322
1931	109
1932	515
1933	543
1934	253
1935	623
1936	148
1937	580
1938	293
1939	383
1940	216
1941	99.0
1942	416
1943	337
1944	213
1945	812
1946	398
1947	258
1948	484
1949	684
1950	1,073
1951	554
1952	385
1953	148
1954	125
1955	262
1956	236
1957	797
1958	551
1959	339
1960	223
1961	585
1962	472
1963	176
1964	236
1965	298
1966	360
1967	318
1968	375
1969	553
1970	497
1971	236
1972	450
1973	768
1974	418
1975	553
1976	239
1977	356
1978	308
1979	668
1980	194
1981	282
1982	697
1983	678
1984	613
1985	687
1986	289
1987	169
1988	226
1989	441
1990	558
1991	466
1992	174
1993	514
1994	354
1995	364
1996	401
1997	435
1998	314
1999	341
2000	275
2001	368
2002	632
2003	532
2004	353
2005	359
2006	630
2007	428
2008	786
2009	541
2010	281
2011	879
2012	149
2013	436
2014	346
2015	758
2016	650
2017	463
2018	687
2019	873
2020	601
2021	464
2022	459
2023	439
2024	383
2025	599

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	1923–2025
Completeness	99.0% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	One period inside 1923–2025 holds no value: 1924. It is drawn as a break in the line and is never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1923 and is not continuous from it: 103 years separate the first value from the last, and 99% 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 Ohio and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
CACHE RIVER AT FORMAN, IL	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	242	1923–2026
OHIO RIVER AT METROPOLIS, IL	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	124	1913–2026

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 — 05140206. 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
CACHE RIVER AT FORMAN, IL	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
OHIO RIVER AT METROPOLIS, IL	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	114	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-03612000.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 Ohio gauge records, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-lower-ohio/

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 Ohio 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 03612000, 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.