The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 472 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

472

Values held

1891–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the San Francisco 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 SAN FRANCISCO RIVER AT CLIFTON, AZ

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1891–2023.

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	SAN FRANCISCO RIVER AT CLIFTON, AZ (m³/s)
1891	1,841
1905	1,699
1906	1,982
1911	425
1912	566
1914	142
1916	1,671
1927	115
1928	95.7
1929	147
1930	96.8
1931	94.3
1932	283
1933	108
1934	331
1935	69.4
1936	105
1937	351
1938	129
1939	34.8
1940	246
1941	225
1943	44.7
1944	108
1945	79.9
1946	39.1
1947	166
1948	166
1949	682
1950	23.4
1951	20.8
1952	447
1953	172
1954	206
1955	239
1957	148
1958	198
1959	328
1960	334
1961	201
1962	405
1964	246
1965	160
1967	983
1969	36.0
1970	153
1971	261
1972	1,812
1974	27.3
1975	850
1976	87.8
1977	71.4
1978	269
1980	280
1981	44.5
1982	57.2
1983	172
1984	776
1985	102
1986	54.9
1988	103
1990	27.0
1991	391
1992	182
1993	1,215
1994	27.5
1995	629
1996	49.6
1998	57.5
1999	209
2000	13.0
2002	208
2003	9.51
2005	617
2006	111
2007	77.0
2008	391
2010	218
2011	29.7
2012	21.3
2013	861
2014	107
2015	185
2016	75.0
2018	14.9
2019	157
2021	68.8
2022	94.3
2023	162

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	1891–2023
Completeness	66.9% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	20 separate periods inside 1891–2023 hold no value. The longest runs from 1892 to 1904 — 13 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1891 and is not continuous from it: 133 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	2026-08-31
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 SAN FRANCISCO RIVER AT CLIFTON, AZ, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1914–2025.

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	SAN FRANCISCO RIVER AT CLIFTON, AZ (mm)
1914	45.0
1915	90.0
1917	25.0
1928	14.0
1929	16.0
1930	15.0
1931	25.0
1932	42.0
1936	17.0
1937	31.0
1938	12.0
1939	12.0
1940	23.0
1941	66.0
1942	17.0
1943	10.0
1944	9.00
1945	15.0
1946	9.00
1947	7.00
1948	12.0
1949	44.0
1950	6.00
1951	6.00
1952	32.0
1953	7.00
1954	13.0
1955	13.0
1956	4.00
1957	18.0
1958	45.0
1959	16.0
1960	25.0
1961	17.0
1962	35.0
1963	24.0
1964	12.0
1965	39.0
1966	35.0
1967	27.0
1968	54.0
1969	11.0
1970	10.0
1971	17.0
1972	40.0
1973	58.0
1974	8.00
1975	26.0
1976	11.0
1977	9.00
1978	62.0
1979	58.0
1980	37.0
1981	10.0
1982	18.0
1983	105
1984	33.0
1985	53.0
1986	24.0
1987	30.0
1988	34.0
1989	10.0
1990	13.0
1991	52.0
1992	57.0
1993	99.0
1994	27.0
1995	36.0
1996	14.0
1997	18.0
1998	26.0
1999	18.0
2000	31.0
2001	17.0
2002	9.00
2003	10.0
2004	13.0
2005	49.0
2006	23.0
2007	18.0
2008	29.0
2009	7.00
2010	34.0
2011	8.00
2012	8.00
2013	30.0
2014	15.0
2015	23.0
2016	15.0
2017	26.0
2018	7.00
2019	23.0
2020	24.0
2021	12.0
2022	26.0
2023	30.0
2024	12.0
2025	5.00

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	1914–2025
Completeness	87.5% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	3 separate periods inside 1914–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1918 to 1927 — 10 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1914 and is not continuous from it: 112 years separate the first value from the last, and 88% 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 San Francisco and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
SAN FRANCISCO RIVER AT CLIFTON, AZ	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	242	1891–2026
SAN FRANCISCO RIVER NEAR GLENWOOD, NM	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	230	1928–2026

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 — 15040004. 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
SAN FRANCISCO RIVER AT CLIFTON, AZ	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
SAN FRANCISCO RIVER NEAR GLENWOOD, NM	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	136	yes, 20 or more
Values held	472	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-09444500.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), San Francisco gauge records, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-san-francisco/

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 San Francisco 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 confidence2023-01-17

Source: USGS — National Water Information System, USGS site 09444500, 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.