Convergence of the Culgoa and Barwon Rivers to form the Darling River

Basin Map & Gauges

Map of the basins and major rivers, including flow information can be found below. Other resources for river flows can be found in many of the official sources listed below.

Minimum flow is around 2 Cumecs and a good flow is considered to be above 10 Cumecs. The latter is my personal minimum. Flows are estimated from the BOM river feeds that give river heights only and I used historical records to correlate these heights to the historical flows. This is only a rough estimate as water downstream can slow the flow seen at the same height as a flood that is not being held up. Some flow heights are estimates only.

No flow
Height where flow ceased was assumed to be zero if no historical data was found.
Poor flow
A level that is likely too low to kayak, with a flow under 2 Cumecs.
Low flow
A level that may be paddlable? The flow was calculated to be under 10 Cumecs.
Good flow
A flow over 10 Cumecs. Times two is 20 Cumecs and times five is 50 Cumecs.
Flood
The river is in flood based on it's height. Only selected sites are checked.
Neutral
Location has observations but the status is unknown.
Unknown
No observation providers or no observations returned for this location.

Data pulled from Bureau of Meteorology and other sources. .

Page load: 2024-03-29 00:33:47

BoM FTP:
cached (3hr 45m ago) in 325.6ms
QLD WMIP:
cached (1hr 40m ago) in 13.8ms
NSW WMIP:
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VIC WMIP:
cached (1hr 40m ago) in 17.1ms
WA Water:
cached (15hr 50m ago) in 55.9ms
MDBA:
cached (9hr 56m ago) in 3.2ms
GM:
cached (15hr 50m ago) in 1.1ms
SEQWater:
cached (15hr 50m ago) in 0.7ms
SnowyHydro:
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Sun Water:
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WaterNSW:
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Official Flow Sources

MDBA Murray Darling System Overview
An excellent instant view of the Murray Darling system. Includes tributaries such as the Mitta Mitta, Ovens, Goulburn and Murrumbidgee rivers as well as others. This should be your go to resource if you are considering doing the Murray River!

Some of the other sources include:

QLD Stations
Water Monitoring Information Portal
NSW Stations
WaterNSW real time data overview
VIC Stations
DELWP real time data overview
SA Stations
Water Data SA
NT Stations
NT Water Data WebPortal
TAS Stations
NRE Tasmania Water Information Web Portal
WA Stations
Water Information Reporting Web Portal. There is also another older page just for river gauges.

I have used historical data for some sites to map flows at key heights to allow flow estimates for the BoM observations.

Map vector data is a mix of manually created content and basin boundaries supplied from Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia (© Commonwealth of Australia 2014)

Rainfall Observations and Forecasts

The Bureau of Meteorology provide a number of various tools to look at forecast rainfall including:

Rainfall Observation
Map of daily, weekly and monthly rainfall observations can show potential inflows.
Rainfall Forecast
Raw data from their computer models to estimate 5 day rainfall amounts. Useful to use in combination with local area forecasts.
Rainfall Outlook
A longer term outlook looking ahead up to 3 months.
ENSO Outlook
La Niña, a negative IOD and a positive SAM all point to a wetter forecast for the eastern coast.
Soil Moisture
This can provide an insight to what runoffs can be expected with rain. If there is a water deficit, much of any rainfall will be sucked up by the dry soil, before feeding the creeks and streams.