What is the record saying about your river?

No, and the reason is worth a paragraph. Driftwise's Environmental Risk engine produces a state for a monitored river reach — but it does that from more than a dozen inputs measured against a baseline built for that specific reach over time, for reaches a program has actually registered. An arbitrary point clicked on a map has no baseline, no registered reach, and no history, so anything this page called a “score” would be a different method wearing the product's vocabulary. What you get here is the nine federal readings themselves, each labelled with what it is a fact about. What Driftwise adds for a monitored reach is a state that moves over time and a recommended next step — that is the product, and it is not something a single click can honestly produce.

Almost certainly not. It is the reading at the nearest USGS gauge that has a long enough record to rank against, and the panel prints that gauge's name, how far away it is, and whether it even sits in the same subbasin as your point. There is no gauge at most points in the country. Distance here is measured straight across the ground, not along the river network, so a gauge on the other side of a ridge can be nearer than one on your own water — which is exactly why the reading is presented as a fact about that gauge and not as a value for your location.

It is USGS's own classification: today's mean discharge at that gauge, ranked against every reading that gauge has taken on this calendar day across its record. Below the 10th percentile is “much below normal”, 10th to 25th is “below normal”, 25th to 75th is “normal”, and so on up. The thresholds are the agency's, not ours. A gauge with fewer than ten years of record for the date is reported as unclassified rather than ranked — about a quarter of the national network is in that position, and ranking three years of data would produce a drought signal out of noise.

Because that is the finest grain the national record publishes with geometry. EPA crosswalks each Clean Water Act assessment to the HUC12 subwatersheds its geometry touches, and Driftwise rolls those up to the 2,456 HUC8 subbasins that have published boundaries — an average of about 3,700 km² each. The subbasin is drawn on the map when you click, so you can see the area the figure covers. A finer answer needs subwatershed geometry that is not currently published nationally; if this tool earns the traffic, that is the first thing we would add.

This page cannot tell you that, and neither can the underlying data. An assessment is a multi-year regulatory determination about designated uses — swimming, fishing, drinking water supply, aquatic life — made by a state, not a measurement of today's water. A subbasin can be mostly impaired with the stretch in front of you fine, or the reverse. For anything you intend to act on, use your state or county health department for beach and swimming advisories, your utility's Consumer Confidence Report for drinking water, and EPA's How's My Waterway for the authoritative record of an individual water.

No — it means nobody has looked. Clean Water Act assessment is done by the states, on their own budgets and schedules, and none of them assesses everything: roughly half the country's 103,000 subwatersheds contain no assessed water at all, and 421 of the 2,456 subbasins have none whatsoever. “Not assessed” is deliberately kept off the severity scale here rather than shown as a low reading, because putting “nobody looked” somewhere between clean and filthy is the single most misleading thing a water quality map can do.

One of two reasons, and the panel says which. Either there is no NOAA forecast gauge inside your subbasin — in which case nothing is shown, because flood categories are stage thresholds set gauge by gauge from local impacts and simply do not transfer across a divide — or the gauge is there but has no current forecast. That second case is common: only about 2,000 of the country's 12,900 gauges carry a forecast on a quiet day. “No current forecast” is not “no flooding”, and this page will never print the second when it means the first.

No. It is a pre-screening indicator from NASA and EPA's Cyanobacteria Assessment Network — a satellite pigment index, read weekly over roughly 2,300 U.S. lakes large enough to resolve at 300 metres. The index cannot distinguish a toxic bloom from a harmless one, it says nothing at all about microcystin or any other toxin, and it reads only the water's surface, so a bloom the wind has mixed down can be missed completely. Cell densities are estimates converted from that index and carry roughly 29% mean absolute percentage error. Your state's cyanobacteria programme is the authority on whether a lake is safe to use, and the panel links to it by name rather than telling you to go and find it.

Most likely because the satellite product resolves no lake in your subbasin. It reads about 2,300 lakes nationally — the ones big enough to see at 300 metres — across 2,456 subbasins, and they are not evenly spread, so most points in the country have none. It also does not read rivers at all. That blank means “no lake here is large enough for this instrument”, never “nothing here is blooming”. Two special cases get their own wording: Hawaii and Puerto Rico are outside the composite's footprint entirely, so nothing there was looked at; and no Alaskan lake appears at all, because the published resolvable set is derived from the Lower 48 composite and Alaska is read against a coarser land mask — a limit of the product, not a finding about Alaskan water.

It is not news at all, and the page is built so it can never look like good news. Cloud cover, ice or snow, a drawn-down or dry bed, a lake the sensor cannot resolve, or a retrieval that failed on our side all produce that answer, and the panel names which of them it was. An unassessable lake is deliberately kept out of the count the reading divides by, so a subbasin holding one readable lake and five unreadable ones reports what that one lake showed, over a count that says plainly it was one of six — rather than quietly averaging five blanks into the clean end. Separately, a lake reported “below detection” was read: it means nothing was seen above roughly 10,000 estimated cells per millilitre, which is the bottom of what the instrument can see rather than a verified absence.

It means the National Interagency Fire Center's current incident record still carries it. That record keeps an incident after it is contained, so a fire listed at 100% contained can appear in the list — the panel shows the containment figure so you can see. Roughly half of live incidents carry no containment figure at all, and those are shown as “not reported” rather than as 0%. Distance is measured to a fire's mapped perimeter where one has been flown, and to its reported point of origin where one has not, which on a large fire can be a long way from the nearest flames.

No. It is NOAA's HRRR-Smoke model — the modelled near-surface smoke mass in the 3 km cell over your point, for the forecast hour nearest now — read back from the rendered forecast tile through the pipeline's own colour ramp. That makes it a band (light, moderate, heavy…) with the concentration range printed beside it, not a number anyone should quote, and it is not PM2.5 from a monitor and not an air quality index. The band edges happen to coincide with EPA's PM2.5 breakpoints, but the health categories that go with those are defined for 24-hour measurements. AirNow and your state air agency are the authorities on air quality. HRRR covers the lower 48 only, so a point in Alaska, Hawaii or Puerto Rico reads as outside the model rather than as clear.

It lists every listed species that has critical habitat designated under the Endangered Species Act somewhere in the subbasin you clicked in, with the designating agency — NOAA Fisheries for salmon, steelhead and sturgeon, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for nearly everything else — and whether the designation is final or proposed, because a final designation means a federal action there requires section 7 consultation and a proposed one triggers a conference. It is a subbasin-wide fact, like the water quality row: a species is listed if any of its designated units falls anywhere in those roughly 3,700 km², so the designating agency is the authority on whether it includes the water in front of you. “None designated” means exactly that — no critical habitat is designated in the subbasin. It does not mean no listed species lives there (critical habitat is designated for a fraction of listed species, and lags listing by years), and it does not mean a project there is unconstrained.

It is USGS's Annual National Land Cover Database, which classifies every 30 m square of the lower 48 states from Landsat imagery each year back to 1985. Driftwise summarises it over each subbasin: the share of the area in each of NLCD's sixteen classes, grouped into forest, agriculture, shrub and grassland, developed land, wetlands, open water and barren land, plus the average impervious surface. The reading shows the latest year USGS has published and how each group has moved since 1985, leaving out moves of under one percentage point. It describes the whole subbasin, not the land beside your point, and it is refreshed once a year when USGS releases the next year. Alaska, Hawaii and the territories are outside the national product.

Yes to all three. The search box finds subbasins, USGS gauges and screened lakes by name — the names come from the datasets the page already holds, so every result is a place it can actually answer about, and nothing is sent to a geocoding service. “Use my location” asks your browser for your position once and reads it; nothing is stored. Once a pin is down, the arrow keys move it about 200 metres (2 km with Shift) from the readings panel, “Copy link” gives you a URL that reopens the page with the pin already dropped, and “Print / PDF” prints every reading with its source, status and date, without the map.

Each row carries its own date, because the nine feeds move at completely different speeds and one shared “updated just now” would be false for most of them. Wildfire incidents are re-harvested hourly. The smoke row is dated by the forecast frame it read, and says how many hours into the forecast that frame is. NOAA flood forecasts are re-harvested hourly. USGS flow is rebuilt twice a day, because a daily mean ranked against a daily percentile only moves once a day. The Drought Monitor is authored by hand once a week, valid for a Tuesday and released the following Thursday. The cyanobacteria reading is a seven-day satellite composite published weekly and lagging a few days behind the end of its own window, so that row is dated by the composite's window rather than by when we fetched it. Clean Water Act assessment is a biennial state process that we merely republish nightly, and critical habitat moves with the Federal Register — the row is dated by when the designation set was last harvested. Where a feed has fallen materially behind its own schedule, the row says so and dates the reading rather than presenting it as current.

USGS, NOAA's National Water Prediction Service and HRRR-Smoke model, EPA ATTAINS, NIFC/WFIGS, the U.S. Drought Monitor, NASA and EPA's Cyanobacteria Assessment Network, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries critical habitat records, and USGS PAD-US. Your browser never contacts any of them. Driftwise harvests each source into its own store on the schedule that source actually moves at and publishes static copies to its own CDN, which is what this page reads — so the agencies see one harvest per refresh regardless of how many people open the page. That is a deliberate design rule across every Driftwise public map.

Use it to see what the federal record says, then check the authorities before acting. This is a re-serving of public data with the transfer distances made visible, not a warning service and not a monitoring programme: it has no site conditions, no local knowledge, no history for your reach, and no idea what the water did yesterday. The National Weather Service and local emergency management are authoritative for flooding, your state health department for water contact advisories, and the land manager for access.

Continuity and a next step. Driftwise registers the specific river reaches and access points a programme is responsible for, watches these federal feeds plus the rest of the more than a dozen it reads against a baseline built for each of those reaches, and turns a change into a state that moves over time and a recommended action — rather than a page somebody has to remember to open and interpret. It also holds the field record alongside it: crew observations, monitoring results, closures and the decisions that followed, so the reason an access point was closed in April is still there in September. This page is the free, single-point, single-moment version of the input side.