EA gauges

[morsey]

Is it just me or are the EA gauges just not updating frequently enough to be much use!

[Jim Pullen]

Depends on the gauge and whether they expect flooding. Twice a day is standard, but can rise to every 15mins in spate. I think they try and minimise the number of readings to save batteries!

[Andrew Battye]

I agree, especially for fast rising rivers e.g. Swale. If the river can go from empty to spate in half an hour and the guage only updates twice a day, its hard to know what level it will be at when you get there. That said, it's still a fantastic resource that makes decisions on which rivers to paddle much easier to make. A few of us paddled the Derbyshire Wye last weekend for a change and we probably wouldn't have risked the trip down had we not seen the guage!

[Scumbag_Scout]

They're also on GMT time zone, not BST, so you need to add one hour to them to make them current times.

For Thames gauges for example, get updated every 2 hours and occasionally additionally, they seem to get reading read at 13:30 GMT for example and updated on the website at 14:00 GMT, so you would be seeing the reading from 14:30 at 15:00 BST for example....

I'm sure this will apply to other gauges.

[Mad_Erik]

Is that not something to do with the barrage, so they can anticipate what is coming down towards it?