The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 416 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

416

Values held

1905–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Upper Cedar 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 Cedar River at Janesville, IA

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1905–2025.

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	Cedar River at Janesville, IA (m³/s)
1905	165
1906	767
1915	204
1916	343
1917	620
1918	210
1919	195
1920	175
1921	433
1923	131
1924	125
1925	194
1926	114
1927	131
1929	0
1933	943
1934	317
1935	271
1936	317
1937	340
1938	252
1939	212
1940	125
1941	252
1942	286
1945	971
1946	416
1947	345
1948	711
1949	396
1950	572
1951	708
1952	416
1953	425
1954	521
1955	125
1956	100.0
1957	53.5
1958	31.1
1959	187
1960	374
1961	1,048
1962	680
1963	176
1964	35.1
1965	827
1967	218
1968	614
1969	665
1970	96.3
1971	323
1972	143
1973	467
1974	306
1975	340
1976	262
1977	69.7
1978	276
1979	445
1980	422
1981	200
1982	273
1983	362
1984	343
1985	131
1986	428
1988	87.2
1989	118
1990	362
1991	411
1992	250
1993	991
1994	161
1995	126
1996	120
1997	311
1998	303
1999	1,195
2000	481
2001	614
2002	73.3
2003	188
2004	708
2005	209
2006	300
2007	297
2008	1,512
2009	162
2010	527
2011	496
2012	122
2013	915
2014	578
2015	394
2016	1,002
2018	521
2019	578
2020	334
2021	844
2022	191
2023	314
2024	750
2025	0

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	1905–2025
Completeness	85.1% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	8 separate periods inside 1905–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1907 to 1914 — 8 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1905 and is not continuous from it: 121 years separate the first value from the last, and 85% 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 Cedar River at Janesville, IA, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1905–2025.

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	Cedar River at Janesville, IA (mm)
1905	169
1915	265
1916	198
1917	184
1918	182
1919	191
1920	141
1921	136
1922	109
1923	75.0
1924	124
1925	72.0
1926	76.0
1933	128
1934	40.0
1935	123
1936	129
1937	143
1938	184
1939	105
1940	75.0
1941	203
1946	179
1947	196
1948	137
1949	130
1950	121
1951	318
1952	187
1953	158
1954	140
1955	79.0
1956	60.0
1957	61.0
1958	43.0
1959	137
1960	153
1961	188
1962	259
1963	137
1964	58.0
1965	319
1966	179
1967	138
1968	168
1969	306
1970	166
1971	217
1972	211
1973	387
1974	261
1975	215
1976	112
1977	65.0
1978	198
1979	360
1980	310
1981	223
1982	400
1983	489
1984	359
1985	170
1986	356
1987	108
1988	87.0
1989	72.0
1990	267
1991	366
1992	292
1993	703
1994	239
1995	217
1996	157
1997	253
1998	292
1999	439
2000	250
2001	352
2002	120
2003	156
2004	340
2005	245
2006	259
2007	386
2008	453
2009	240
2010	383
2011	342
2012	91.0
2013	413
2014	343
2015	304
2016	634
2017	423
2018	667
2019	626
2020	367
2021	209
2022	240
2023	217
2024	326
2025	372

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	1905–2025
Completeness	84.3% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	3 separate periods inside 1905–2025 hold no value. The longest runs from 1906 to 1914 — 9 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1905 and is not continuous from it: 121 years separate the first value from the last, and 84% 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 Upper Cedar and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
Cedar River at Janesville, IA	catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	209	1905–2026
CEDAR RIVER NEAR AUSTIN, MN	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, annual maximum river flow, mean river flow	207	1909–2026

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 — 07080201. 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
Cedar River at Janesville, IA	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
CEDAR RIVER NEAR AUSTIN, MN	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	122	yes, 20 or more
Values held	416	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-05458500.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 Cedar gauge records, accessed 2026-09-02, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-upper-cedar/

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 Cedar 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 confidence2025-08-21

Source: USGS — National Water Information System, USGS site 05458500, 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.