Rivers — stany wód
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Poland's disasters are river disasters. The 1997 flood on the Odra killed more than fifty people and is still called powódź tysiąclecia, the flood of the millennium. 2010 put the Vistula over Sandomierz and Świnary. In September 2024 more than 400 mm fell on the Kłodzko basin in four days and the Nysa Kłodzka took the town apart.
IMGW publishes the whole gauge network — 913 stations — and, unusually, publishes each gauge's own warning and alarm stage in centimetres. Those thresholds are what make a water level mean something: 300 cm on the Skroda at Przewoźniki is a warning, and on the Vistula at Warsaw it is an ordinary summer afternoon. A national colour scale on raw water level would say nothing at all.
Reading the map
alarm at or above the alarm stage —
the level at which flood defence begins.
warning at or above the warning stage —
water on the floodplain.
within 50 cm of the warning stage, drawn small.
Gauges comfortably below their warning stage are not drawn. There are usually about 890 of them and a map of all 913 is a map of where gauges are, not of where the water is.
The forecast half of the question is on the map explorer: total precipitation over the next two and a half days at 2.8 km, and the snow line, which decides whether a Carpathian winter rain event runs off immediately or waits in the snowpack.
Gauges above, or within half a metre of, their warning stage
| State | River | Gauge | Level cm | Warning | Alarm | Margin cm | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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