Live River and Flood Watchboard: Real-Time Water Intelligence for North Carolina

Across North Carolina’s diverse landscapes from the Appalachian headwaters to the coastal plains, rivers pulse with life, data, and risk. The Live River and Flood Watchboard brings those dynamics into view in real time, transforming raw sensor streams into an intuitive dashboard of river health and flood conditions.

What It Shows

The map combines two powerful, open data feeds:

• USGS National Water Information System (NWIS): real-time measurements of stream height and discharge from hundreds of gauges statewide.

• NOAA and NWS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP): active flood warnings, watches, and advisories.

Each circle on the map represents a cluster of USGS gauges, color-coded by current flood stage percentile:

• 🟢 Below 70% – Normal to low flow conditions

• 🟡 70–99% – Elevated water levels, approaching flood thresholds

• 🔴 ≥100% – Flooding or above-stage events

When you zoom in, individual gauges appear as teardrop markers. Clicking on one reveals a mini-sparkline showing the recent water-level trend, a 30- to 120-minute micrograph of the river’s heartbeat.

Real-Time Alerts in Context

Overlayed icons in orange and red indicate active NWS flood alerts, from minor to extreme.

These pop up dynamically as new warnings are issued, allowing residents, emergency responders, and researchers to see where hydrologic stress is unfolding right now.

How It Works Behind the Scenes

The system quietly stitches together live data streams:

• Fetches JSON feeds from USGS NWIS and NWS CAP every few minutes

• Parses and harmonizes them with pandas and geopandas

• Visualizes results using Leaflet/Folium, with basemaps provided by CARTO

• Renders tiny matplotlib sparklines inside interactive pop-ups for each station

The outcome is a responsive, map-centric dashboard that can be refreshed or embedded in any Jupyter-based workflow which is ideal for classroom demonstrations, watershed monitoring, or community preparedness dashboards.

Why It Matters

Floods remain North Carolina’s most frequent and costly natural hazard. By turning raw hydrologic data into something instantly readable, this watchboard helps:

• Spot developing floods early

• Compare conditions regionally

• Communicate river behaviour visually

From the Broad River near Boiling Springs to the Tar-Pamlico Basin near Greenville, the map makes invisible water dynamics visible, empowering anyone to understand their watershed in real time.