What is this?
This project processes the open gauge data of the German Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration (WSV) in real time and derives physically interpretable variables from it: longitudinal water-surface slope, wave celerity, flood-routing models, 1- to 72-hour forecasts with precipitation-forecast integration.
🚣 Ruder-Club Neptun Darmstadt — Boathouse & Regatta
A dedicated dashboard for RC Neptun Darmstadt (boathouse at the Stockstadt-Erfelden side-arm of the Rhine) shows live navigability status, current estimation, and a map of the rowing area.
Reference gauge is Worms (Rhine-km 443). Below 100 cm boats must be portaged at the southern tip; from 150 cm the side-arm is navigable; above 640 cm the nature reserve is fully closed.
Live dashboards
Maps & visualisations
Validation plots
Scientific methodology
The project follows classical scientific methods: hypotheses, transparent implementation, retrospective validation against real flood events, honest forecast-skill tables with documented caveats. Detailed documentation in the wiki:
→ Methodology (all phases) → Project overview
Main results
- Wave celerity Worms→Mainz: 2.5–4 m/s (event-CCF on flood events 2018–2024). Consistent with Lighthill-Whitham theory (5/3 × flow velocity).
- Muskingum routing Q_Worms + Q_Raunheim → Q_Mainz achieves NSE > 0.97 across all 6 tested flood events.
- System memory > 7 days (ACF e-folding time not reached) — the middle Rhine is a slow system.
- Daily-periodic peak at 1/24 h (likely shipping traffic, evaporation, or upstream Swiss reservoir releases).
- ARX forecast Worms +72 h: NSE 0.92, RMSE 28 cm, skill 45 % vs persistence — using real ECMWF-IFS precipitation forecasts (TIGGE reforecast 2018–2024).
- Flood-warner hit rate: 95 % pre-fire rate across all 11 flood events 2018–2026, average warning lead time 16-21 h before the 430 cm threshold crossing.
Stations
Data sources — all open
All models in this project are trained exclusively on public, freely accessible data sets. Every source is reproducible, every processing pipeline is documented in the wiki:
Licence & disclaimer
The values shown are unverified raw values — display is for scientific-technical and informational purposes only and without warranty. For official flood warnings see the German federal-state flood forecast centres (Hochwasservorhersagezentralen).
This visualisation is a citizen-science demonstration created under private responsibility. Open-source stack (InfluxDB, Grafana, Caddy, Python/scikit-learn/statsmodels) hosted on Hetzner Cloud (Frankfurt).