Home / Water levels
Live water levels and closures for boaters
For boaters planning a trip on the Rhine, the Moselle or the Danube, or keeping a boat on Lake Constance, water levels decide a lot. The live reading tells you whether there is enough depth for your draught and whether the river is rising fast. This page shows live readings from the official gauges on German federal waterways, the Austrian Danube and Lake Constance, with the trend and a seven day chart. Links to official notices about closures follow further down.
For official weather warnings at your mooring, see our weather warning map. What to do on board when a flood is coming is covered in our severe weather checklists.
Find a gauge
Type a river, a lake or a town on the water. Or show the gauges closest to where you are. Your position stays in your browser.
Source: PEGELONLINE, German Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration (WSV), licence DL-DE->Zero-2.0. Readings are unchecked raw data, loaded straight from the source when you open them.
Key gauges
Select a name to see the current reading with trend and chart above. We deliberately list no figures here: yesterday's level is of no use when you cast off.
Rhine
Elbe
Danube
Moselle, Main and Oder
Lakes and Berlin waters
Baltic and North Sea
How to read a gauge
A gauge reading is not the depth of the water. It is the height of the water surface above a fixed reference point at the gauge, the gauge zero. A reading of 80 centimetres does not mean there are only 80 centimetres of water. How much water is left under your keel depends on the fairway, and some gauges also publish a fairway depth as a reference value.
The trend compares the latest reading with the one from about six hours earlier. If a river rises noticeably in that time, check mooring lines, fenders and the pontoon before nightfall.
Reference values come from PEGELONLINE for each gauge; not every gauge has all of them. The abbreviations are German:
- MNW, MW, MHW: mean low water, mean water level and mean high water over a series of years
- NNW, HHW: lowest and highest level recorded so far
- HSW: highest navigable water level: above it, the waterway rules restrict navigation
- Mark I, Mark II: flood marks to which the local navigation rules link restrictions
- GlW: equivalent water level, a low water reference on free flowing stretches
Closures and notices to skippers
In Germany, the waterways administration publishes lock closures, restrictions and notices to skippers on ELWIS; for the Austrian Danube, viadonau does the same on DoRIS. We found no openly usable interface that would let us show these notices here, so the links below take you to the official sources. The official pages are mostly in German.
- Notices to inland skippers in Germany (ELWIS)
- Lock closures in Germany (ELWIS)
- Water levels and forecasts in Germany (ELWIS)
- Flood centres of the German states
- Lake Constance water level information
- Austrian Danube: gauges and notices on DoRIS (viadonau)
The Austrian Danube gauges run by viadonau are also published through PEGELONLINE, so you can search them above, for example Kienstock or Wildungsmauer. If your engine lets you down, see our breakdown assistance overview.
We show the readings exactly as PEGELONLINE delivers them, without checks of our own and without any guarantee of completeness or timeliness. On the water, official notices and conditions on site always come first.
