ea-flood

name	ea-flood
description	Query the Environment Agency Real-Time Flood Monitoring API — active flood warnings and alerts, ~5,000 monitoring stations measuring river levels, flows, rainfall, tide and groundwater, and the historic archive. Free, no auth. Use when the question is about a current flood warning in a particular area (constituency / council / county), a river-level reading, rainfall recordings, or flood-area polygons. Coverage: England only (Scotland uses SEPA, Wales uses NRW, NI uses DfI Rivers). Pairs with mapit / ons-geo to ask 'is this constituency at flood risk right now'.
license	Open Government Licence v3.0 (Crown copyright; Environment Agency)
metadata	{"facility":"ea-flood","cli-alias":"flood","base-url":"https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring","provenance":{"tier":3,"operator":"Environment Agency (DEFRA)","service":"environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring","upstream-data":"EA's live operational telemetry from monitoring stations + flood-warning service; historic readings archive back ~2015","citation-short":"via Environment Agency flood-monitoring API","citation-formal":"Environment Agency Real-Time Flood Monitoring API, retrieved {date}, OGL v3.0","confidence":"authoritative","confidence-notes":"Live operational data. Coverage limited to England — for Scotland use SEPA, Wales NRW, NI DfI Rivers (none wrapped yet). Sensor outages happen; check the `status` field on each station."}}

Environment Agency flood monitoring

Base URL: https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring Documented at https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring/doc/reference.

What's wrapped

Endpoint	Use
/id/floods	Currently-active flood warnings + alerts (severity 1-4).
/id/floodAreas	All ~4,400 defined warning / alert polygons.
/id/floodAreas/<id>	One area.
/id/stations	All monitoring stations. Filter by parameter (level / flow / rainfall / wind / temperature), location, river.
/id/stations/<ref>	One station.
/id/stations/<ref>/readings	Latest readings from one station.
/data/readings	Cross-station readings (big — filter aggressively).
/archive	Historic-readings dataset listing.

Severity levels for floods

Level	Meaning
1	Severe Flood Warning — danger to life
2	Flood Warning — flooding is expected
3	Flood Alert — flooding is possible
4	Warning no Longer in Force — removed within last 24 h

CLI

parl flood warnings --min-severity 2 --take 50
parl flood warnings --county Somerset
parl flood stations --parameter level --river-name "River Severn"
parl flood stations --lat 51.5 --lon -0.1 --dist 10   # London-area
parl flood station-readings 1029TH --latest
parl flood station-readings 1029TH --since 2026-05-15T00:00:00Z

Joins to Parliament

• Use mapit to resolve a constituency to its bounding box / centroid; pass --lat --lon --dist to flood warnings / flood stations to filter by area.
• Flooding debates surface regularly in hansard; this skill is the live-operational backing for those debates.
• The Environment Agency itself answers PQs and appears before the EFRA select committee — pair with committees / written-questions-and-statements.

Provenance to cite

Tier 3 — third-party (Environment Agency), authoritative.

• Inline cite: "(via Environment Agency flood-monitoring API)" — once per paragraph.
• Cite the station reference + parameter + timestamp for any specific reading (e.g. "River Lee at Walthamstow Low Hall, level 0.85m at 2026-05-17T18:00:00Z").
• Live values change every 15 minutes; date your statement.
• England only — for the rest of GB+NI cite that you don't have comparable data, rather than implying none exists.
• See ../../docs/provenance.md.