The monitoring network within this area

Hydrionis holds 504 values from 3 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

504

Values held

1911–2026

Record spans

Gauges within the Upper Kern huc8 subbasin

3 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 KERN R A KERNVILLE CA

The highest instantaneous discharge the publisher recorded in each year — a flood peak as measured, not a daily average of one. 1950–1992.

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 (0 events)

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	KERN R A KERNVILLE CA (m³/s)
1950	1,096
1954	91.2
1955	88.3
1957	111
1958	155
1959	30.9
1960	61.7
1961	19.0
1962	110
1963	816
1964	47.6
1966	49.8
1968	58.3
1969	762
1970	294
1971	57.8
1972	31.1
1973	172
1974	151
1975	119
1976	56.9
1977	27.5
1978	221
1979	96.0
1980	453
1981	67.1
1982	374
1983	331
1985	79.0
1986	436
1987	58.6
1988	50.7
1989	63.7
1990	30.6
1991	399
1992	52.1

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	1950–1992
Completeness	83.7% of the periods in that span are held. Gaps are drawn as breaks and never interpolated.
Known gaps	5 separate periods inside 1950–1992 hold no value. The longest runs from 1951 to 1953 — 3 years with no reading. They are drawn as breaks in the line and are never interpolated across.
Continuity	The record begins in 1950 and is not continuous from it: 43 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	2026-10-01
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 COMBINED FLOW OF KERN R AND KERN R NO 3 CA, as a depth

The year's flow spread over the land draining to this gauge, in millimetres — the same unit rainfall is measured in. 1912–2024.

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	COMBINED FLOW OF KERN R AND KERN R NO 3 CA (mm)
1912	181
1913	175
1914	437
1915	289
1916	678
1917	358
1918	261
1919	238
1920	278
1921	245
1922	393
1923	233
1924	88.0
1925	226
1926	173
1927	352
1928	157
1929	159
1930	170
1931	100
1932	334
1933	219
1934	121
1935	239
1936	361
1937	497
1938	569
1939	203
1940	348
1941	542
1942	338
1943	452
1944	248
1945	401
1946	280
1947	186
1948	164
1949	155
1950	278
1951	212
1952	594
1953	243
1954	249
1955	224
1956	399
1957	215
1958	461
1959	126
1960	142
1961	89.0
1962	315
1963	367
1964	153
1965	324
1966	263
1967	617
1968	198
1969	907
1970	261
1971	199
1972	132
1973	425
1974	355
1975	258
1976	116
1977	93.0
1978	659
1979	293
1980	658
1981	198
1982	547
1983	926
1984	343
1985	288
1986	619
1987	174
1988	144
1989	182
1990	100
1991	190
1992	137
1993	368
1994	155
1995	569
1996	429
1997	539
1998	646
1999	184
2000	224
2001	182
2002	195
2003	244
2004	210
2005	502
2006	493
2007	125
2008	256
2009	242
2010	413
2011	604
2012	165
2013	109
2014	96.0
2015	70.0
2016	188
2017	824
2018	185
2019	578
2020	152
2021	86.0
2022	116
2023	1,018
2024	325

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	1912–2024
Completeness	100.0% of the periods in that span are held.
Continuity	Continuous: every year from 1912 to 2024 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 Kern and what each holds
Gauge	Measures	Values	Record
COMBINED FLOW OF KERN R AND KERN R NO 3 CA	burned area within 50 km, catchment area, mean river flow, mean river flow, water year	264	1911–2026
KERN R NO 3 CN NR KERNVILLE CA	burned area within 50 km, mean river flow, mean river flow, water year	199	1921–2024
KERN R A KERNVILLE CA	catchment area, annual maximum river flow	41	1950–2026

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 — 18030001. 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
COMBINED FLOW OF KERN R AND KERN R NO 3 CA	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
KERN R NO 3 CN NR KERNVILLE CA	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
KERN R A KERNVILLE CA	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	2	no
Years spanned	116	yes, 20 or more
Values held	504	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-11186001.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 Kern gauge records, accessed 2026-10-05, hydrionis.com/waters/united-states-upper-kern/

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 Kern 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

Spatially aggregatedHigh confidence2024

Source: USGS — National Water Information System, USGS site 11186001, parameter 00060, annual mean statistics. Licence: Open.

Method: Annual mean discharge as published by the USGS statistics service, computed by USGS from its own quality-controlled daily record. Hydrionis converts cubic feet per second to cubic metres per second and records the publisher unit alongside; it does not recompute the mean.

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.