The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 378 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

378

Values held

1897–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Upper 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 LINVILLE RIVER NEAR NEBO, NC

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	LINVILLE RIVER NEAR NEBO, NC (m³/s)
1923	95.7
1924	164
1926	61.7
1928	236
1929	170
1931	51.3
1932	41.6
1934	48.1
1935	283
1936	63.7
1937	116
1939	124
1940	1,119
1941	68.5
1942	133
1944	38.5
1945	210
1946	95.7
1947	45.9
1949	294
1950	144
1952	156
1953	108
1954	95.4
1955	161
1956	47.9
1957	163
1959	195
1960	71.4
1961	134
1963	126
1964	132
1966	191
1968	105
1969	162
1970	62.3
1972	496
1973	255
1974	119
1975	94.0
1976	213
1977	194
1979	227
1981	39.1
1982	60.9
1983	239
1984	150
1985	47.6
1987	73.1
1989	402
1990	132
1992	264
1993	199
1994	527
1995	493
1996	92.0
1998	243
1999	39.9
2000	106
2001	51.8
2002	73.6
2003	93.7
2004	1,201
2005	86.6
2007	48.4
2008	148
2009	48.1
2010	129
2011	174
2013	368
2015	158
2016	121
2017	76.7
2018	219
2020	132
2021	230
2022	176
2024	801
2025	131

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	76.7% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	24 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 77% 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 LINVILLE RIVER NEAR NEBO, NC, 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	LINVILLE RIVER NEAR NEBO, NC (mm)
1923	743
1924	900
1925	373
1926	608
1927	637
1928	981
1929	1,025
1930	364
1931	521
1932	734
1933	651
1934	744
1935	812
1936	963
1937	818
1938	659
1939	612
1940	1,000
1941	409
1942	899
1943	663
1944	564
1945	894
1946	700
1947	814
1948	830
1949	1,128
1950	734
1951	519
1952	594
1953	632
1954	561
1955	557
1956	545
1957	1,133
1958	705
1959	815
1960	941
1961	920
1962	795
1963	518
1964	962
1965	671
1966	747
1967	602
1968	656
1969	901
1970	831
1971	894
1972	870
1973	1,031
1974	927
1975	1,020
1976	966
1977	1,056
1978	679
1979	1,510
1980	686
1981	395
1982	725
1983	1,255
1984	801
1985	673
1986	477
1987	771
1988	383
1989	1,132
1990	983
1991	769
1992	1,179
1993	766
1994	969
1995	1,125
1996	857
1997	607
1998	893
1999	518
2000	450
2001	491
2002	557
2003	1,067
2004	1,345
2005	987
2006	663
2007	455
2008	600
2009	857
2010	682
2011	781
2012	669
2013	1,488
2014	715
2015	987
2016	522
2017	864
2018	1,961
2019	1,069
2020	1,393
2021	828
2022	795
2023	793
2024	1,240
2025	624

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	100.0% of the periods in that span are held.
Continuity	Continuous: every year from 1923 to 2025 is held.
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

Every gauge Hydrionis holds within this area

Gauges within the Upper Catawba and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
LINVILLE RIVER NEAR NEBO, NC	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow, mean river flow, water year	346	1922–2026
CATAWBA RIVER AT CATAWBA, NC	catchment area, annual maximum river flow	32	1897–2026

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 — 03050101. 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
LINVILLE RIVER NEAR NEBO, NC	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
CATAWBA RIVER AT CATAWBA, NC	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 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	1	no
Years spanned	130	yes, 20 or more
Values held	378	no
Distinct measurements	5	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-02138500.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), Upper Catawba gauge records, accessed 2026-10-05, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-upper-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 Upper 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 confidence2025-05-12

Source: USGS — National Water Information System, USGS site 02138500, 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.