Reference · built on requestCommons signalAir, water & environment

Real Time flood-monitoring API

Flood warnings, river and tide levels, groundwater, and rainfall for England from the Environment Agency, refreshed every 15 minutes.

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About

The Environment Agency's Real Time flood-monitoring API publishes the agency's flood warnings and alerts, the flood areas they apply to, and readings from its telemetered stations: river levels and flows, tidal levels from the UK National Tide Gauge Network at 44 coastal sites, groundwater levels, and 15-minute rainfall totals from about 1000 tipping-bucket gauges. It is a beta service on environment.data.gov.uk with a linked-resource design: stations, measures, and readings reference each other, and every response is available as JSON, CSV, RDF/XML, Turtle, or HTML by URL suffix or content negotiation. Readings are held for the last four weeks; a daily CSV archive covers earlier dates.

Through Fibric, an operator maps your sites to flood areas and stations and proposes holds, notices, and site checks as warnings and levels change.

This is a reference listing. It documents what Fibric would read from Real Time flood-monitoring API and what it could propose, based on the publisher's published interfaces. Fibric builds it under a managed deployment when you request it; selecting it here installs nothing.

Inputs

  • Current flood warnings and alerts from /id/floods, with severityLevel 1 to 4 and filters by county, min-severity, or lat, long, and dist
  • Flood areas and their polygons from /id/floodAreas/{area-code}, the units warnings are issued for
  • Stations from /id/stations filtered by parameter, qualifier, riverName, catchmentName, town, type, status, or radius
  • Measures per station, such as level with qualifier Stage, Downstream Stage, Groundwater, or Tidal Level, and flow
  • Readings from /data/readings and /id/measures/{id}/readings with latest, today, since, date, and startdate to enddate filters
  • Rainfall totals per 15-minute period from stations selected with parameter=rainfall
  • Tide gauge levels reported both to local datum in m and to Ordnance Datum at Newlyn in mAOD

Proposed actions

Read-only. This feed informs operators; it changes nothing.

Proposed actions are target capabilities. Every action runs propose-first and needs a validated deployment and the appropriate permissions.

What you can build

  • Hold deliveries in a warning area

    When a Flood Warning (severity 2) or Severe Flood Warning covers a flood area on a route, the operator proposes holding the stops inside it and drafts the customer message.

    With Weather Hold

  • Prepare a site as the river rises

    Each site follows one or more stations. When level readings climb past the mark you set, or a Flood Alert is raised for the area, the operator proposes the site checklist.

    With Storm Prep

  • Notify staff before a tide peaks

    Tide gauge levels in mAOD against your site's threshold become a draft notice with the reading and the time it was taken, for you to send.

    With Severe Weather Notice

  • Keep the evacuation roster current

    A Severe Flood Warning for a site's flood area proposes the roster and re-proposes it when the warning changes or is withdrawn at severity 4.

    With Evacuation Roster

Requirements

  • Your sites mapped to flood areas and to nearby station references, since warnings are issued by area, not by address
  • The attribution the licence requires: this uses Environment Agency flood and river level data from the real-time data API (Beta)
  • A poll no more often than the 15-minute refresh, using since or latest to fetch only new readings
  • Handling for _limit, which defaults to 500 items and caps at 10000, and _offset for paging
Authentication
None. The API needs no registration or key; responses are open data under the Open Government Licence.

Limits

  • Readings stay in the API for four weeks; older data comes from the daily CSV archive, not the live endpoints
  • The API refreshes every 15 minutes, but some station data reaches the agency only once or twice a day outside heightened flood risk
  • The agency gives no service-level guarantee and says the API should not be relied on for safety critical applications
  • The service is in beta, documented at version 0.8, and individual reading URIs expire after 28 days

Access and pricing

Reference listing. Public feed access is separate from Fibric integration. If you request this feed, your quote covers the build, usage, and support.

Request Real Time flood-monitoring API ↗

Questions and answers

What do the severity levels mean?
1 is Severe Flood Warning (severe flooding, danger to life), 2 is Flood Warning (flooding is expected, immediate action required), 3 is Flood Alert (flooding is possible, be prepared), and 4 is Warning no Longer in Force.
How much history can I read?
The live readings endpoints hold up to the last four weeks, and each individual reading URI stays valid for 28 days. Earlier dates are served as daily CSV files under /flood-monitoring/archive/, one file per date.
What formats and limits apply?
JSON by default, with .csv, .rdf, .ttl, and .html suffixes or content negotiation. Readings endpoints return 500 items unless _limit is set, up to a hard cap of 10000, with _offset for paging and _sorted for newest first.
Ask about Real Time flood-monitoring API

Ask about the capabilities and requirements in this listing.

For project-specific requirements, contact Fibric.

This Commons signal listing is developed, published, and supported by Fibric. It reads public data published by Environment Agency (environment.data.gov.uk). Upstream agencies and projects are the property of their respective owners, who are not affiliated with Fibric and do not sponsor or endorse this listing. Trademark policy