We contacted the Environment Agency to ask why the real time river level information that they collect for Malmesbury was not available online. This is the response I received...
As you are probably aware the flood warnings for Malmesbury are issued from data at Brokenborough and Fosseway (Easton Grey). Since these two gauges are upstream, they offer increased lead times to issue flood warnings. The River Levels on the Internet (RLoI) pages were born out of sites used to issue Flood Warnings rather than those at the site of flooding. The flood warning messages relate directly to the levels at the published sites. This is the second such request I have had today, so I can see it is a cause for concern in Malmesbury.
We do have two gauges at St Johns Bridge, installed for low flow water resources monitoring. In recent years they have suffered from significant siltation and blockages, and did not perform reliably in flood events. Therefore we did not publish this data on the internet. With the kind co-operation of the council in early 2012 we substantially upgraded the Malmesbury gauging stations so that they will work in all conditions, and the data is now of publishable quality.
RLoI is a national system and updates are only issued every 6 months, I am sorry that this update cannot be done immediately, but I will endeavour to get these two sites added to the internet pages when the next update is issued later this year. As an aside, if you feel the historic data will be of use then feel free to submit a data request and I can provide you with the historic 15 minute level data.
....Malmesbury town councillor John Gundry also independently raised this query with the Environment Agency so it looks like thanks to othe information will be available later in the year. I'll try to keep an eye out for it and will add it to the Flood Info website when it's available.
As you are probably aware the flood warnings for Malmesbury are issued from data at Brokenborough and Fosseway (Easton Grey). Since these two gauges are upstream, they offer increased lead times to issue flood warnings. The River Levels on the Internet (RLoI) pages were born out of sites used to issue Flood Warnings rather than those at the site of flooding. The flood warning messages relate directly to the levels at the published sites. This is the second such request I have had today, so I can see it is a cause for concern in Malmesbury.
We do have two gauges at St Johns Bridge, installed for low flow water resources monitoring. In recent years they have suffered from significant siltation and blockages, and did not perform reliably in flood events. Therefore we did not publish this data on the internet. With the kind co-operation of the council in early 2012 we substantially upgraded the Malmesbury gauging stations so that they will work in all conditions, and the data is now of publishable quality.
RLoI is a national system and updates are only issued every 6 months, I am sorry that this update cannot be done immediately, but I will endeavour to get these two sites added to the internet pages when the next update is issued later this year. As an aside, if you feel the historic data will be of use then feel free to submit a data request and I can provide you with the historic 15 minute level data.
....Malmesbury town councillor John Gundry also independently raised this query with the Environment Agency so it looks like thanks to othe information will be available later in the year. I'll try to keep an eye out for it and will add it to the Flood Info website when it's available.