The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 1,090 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.

2

Gauges

1,090

Values held

1906–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Nisqually 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 NISQUALLY RIVER AT LA GRANDE, WA

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1919–2025.

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	NISQUALLY RIVER AT LA GRANDE, WA (m³/s)
1919	326
1920	354
1921	552
1923	476
1924	371
1925	266
1927	261
1928	130
1929	172
1931	303
1945	340
1946	328
1948	237
1949	188
1950	425
1951	436
1953	300
1954	191
1955	479
1957	174
1958	195
1959	377
1961	374
1962	82.1
1964	250
1965	453
1966	75.0
1967	348
1968	253
1970	241
1971	176
1972	394
1974	513
1975	261
1976	67.4
1977	278
1979	82.7
1980	609
1982	476
1983	289
1985	204
1986	213
1988	159
1990	419
1991	493
1992	113
1993	62.9
1994	317
1996	1,119
1997	129
1998	323
1999	219
2001	34.3
2003	309
2005	69.1
2006	379
2007	216
2008	147
2009	253
2010	72.8
2011	309
2012	112
2013	75.0
2014	314
2015	362
2017	225
2018	236
2020	447
2021	216
2022	66.5
2023	118
2025	70.8

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	1919–2025
Completeness	67.3% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	23 separate periods inside 1919–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1932 to 1944 — 13 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1919 and is not continuous from it: 107 years separate the first value from the last, and 67% of the years between them are held. The span is not the record.
Last read from the publisher	2026-10-01
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 NISQUALLY RIVER AT LA GRANDE, WA, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1907–2024.

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	NISQUALLY RIVER AT LA GRANDE, WA (mm)
1907	1,546
1908	1,639
1909	1,514
1910	1,869
1920	1,651
1921	2,103
1922	1,153
1923	1,504
1924	1,430
1925	1,482
1926	1,237
1927	1,875
1928	1,366
1929	1,124
1930	1,020
1944	863
1945	1,395
1946	2,006
1947	1,526
1948	1,790
1949	1,809
1950	2,293
1951	1,777
1952	1,260
1953	1,804
1954	1,913
1955	2,327
1956	2,016
1957	1,572
1958	1,859
1959	2,158
1960	1,783
1961	1,933
1962	1,500
1963	1,425
1964	1,910
1965	1,611
1966	1,540
1967	1,729
1968	1,873
1969	1,613
1970	1,645
1971	2,131
1972	2,283
1973	1,496
1974	2,262
1975	2,205
1976	1,769
1977	1,749
1978	1,314
1979	1,498
1980	1,794
1981	1,693
1982	2,044
1983	1,959
1984	1,804
1985	1,354
1986	1,478
1987	1,345
1988	1,575
1989	1,471
1990	2,047
1991	1,758
1992	1,191
1993	1,280
1994	1,471
1995	2,037
1996	2,144
1997	2,362
1998	1,758
1999	2,271
2000	1,415
2001	1,248
2002	1,652
2003	1,599
2004	1,557
2005	1,308
2006	2,160
2007	1,713
2008	1,725
2009	1,678
2010	1,794
2011	2,052
2012	2,090
2013	1,730
2014	2,009
2015	1,693
2016	1,938
2017	2,091
2018	1,619
2019	1,183
2020	1,980
2021	1,687
2022	1,742
2023	1,343
2024	1,353

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	Derived Computed by Hydrionis
Period held	1907–2024
Completeness	81.4% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	2 separate periods inside 1907–2024 hold no value. The longest runs from 1931 to 1943 — 13 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1907 and is not continuous from it: 118 years separate the first value from the last, and 81% of the years between them are held. The span is not the record.
Inputs last read	2026-10-01 · when the records this was computed from were last read from their publishers
Calculation date	2026-08-24 · when the calculation method was last versioned, not a reading of any publisher
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

The snow standing above this water

1 automated snow station sits inside this drainage area, weighing the snowpack rather than measuring how deep it is.

2,886

Fullest snowpack recorded at Paradise, in 1997 (mm of water)

647

Thinnest, in 2015 (mm of water)

April

Month the pack is usually at its fullest

July

Month the pack has gone by, in half of years

Peak snowpack at Paradise

Water years 1981–2026. Each point is the fullest month of that snow season.

A water year runs October to September and is named for the year it ends, so the snow of one winter stays in one point. The value is the fullest month, not the fullest day: a pack that peaked sharply mid-month reads lower here than a single measurement taken at the right moment would.

View the data behind this chart

Underlying data
Period	Paradise (mm)
1981	1,007
1984	1,751
1985	1,812
1986	1,531
1987	1,536
1988	1,683
1989	2,067
1990	1,866
1991	2,077
1992	1,386
1993	1,581
1994	1,563
1995	1,981
1996	1,661
1997	2,886
1998	1,764
1999	2,834
2000	2,123
2001	1,271
2002	2,371
2003	1,508
2004	1,834
2005	925
2006	2,077
2007	1,831
2008	2,585
2009	2,136
2010	1,704
2011	2,480
2012	2,086
2013	2,166
2014	2,315
2015	647
2016	1,926
2017	2,200
2018	1,963
2019	1,615
2020	2,257
2021	2,344
2022	2,037
2023	1,753
2024	1,479
2025	1,765
2026	962

Read against the river

Paradise and NISQUALLY RIVER AT LA GRANDE, WA both sit in this drainage area, and their records overlap by 44 years. That is the span the two have in common, not a count of years both actually hold — either record may have gaps inside it. The two are shown separately rather than on one axis: millimetres of stored water and cubic metres per second are not commensurable, and a difference between them would mean nothing.

Being in the same drainage area does not put the snowpack upstream of the gauge. A subbasin is an area, and snow on one tributary can join the river below a gauge on another — so a weak relationship here may say more about which tributary was measured than about the snow.

Every gauge Hydrionis holds within this area

Gauges within the Nisqually and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
NISQUALLY RIVER AT LA GRANDE, WA	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow, mean river flow, water year	324	1906–2026
OHOP CREEK NEAR EATONVILLE, WA	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow, mean river flow, water year	238	1927–2026

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 — 17110015. 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
NISQUALLY RIVER AT LA GRANDE, WA	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	2026-10-02
OHOP CREEK NEAR EATONVILLE, WA	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	2026-10-02

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 4 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	121	yes, 20 or more
Values held	1,090	yes, 1000 or more
Distinct measurements	6	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-12086500.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), Nisqually gauge records, accessed 2026-10-05, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-nisqually/

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 Nisqually 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 confidence2025-03-27

Source: USGS — National Water Information System, USGS site 12086500, 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 1 October 2026.