Do I need credentials?

No. Both the USGS Water Data OGC API and the NWS alerts API are public with no key, no account. Anonymous NWS access is rate-limited to roughly 30 requests per minute, so the all-events sweep is kept to a handful of calls.

How does the "since" delta detection work?

The server is stateless. Any tool that returns an as_of or sent timestamp is your baseline: keep it in the agent's context, and on the next check pass it as since. flood_delta then returns only the alerts issued after that moment, split into still-active and since-expired — the agent reports the change, not the whole picture again.

Which rivers and gages are covered?

Every US stream gage that publishes public USGS data — find_gages lists them per state, biggest drainage area first, so the rivers that actually flood (Colorado, Sacramento, Columbia, Missouri, ...) come on top. One honest caveat: USGS daily summaries and continuous feeds are sparse per gage; a gage without recent data answers "no data" with a note instead of failing.

Why are flood alerts nationwide instead of by state?

The NWS API's 2026 revision dropped the state query parameter, so alert sweeps run by event type across the whole country. State-level precision lives in the USGS side of the sentinel: find_gages filters gages by state (and drainage area), so "is my county's river rising?" is answered by the gage, while "is anything flooding in the US?" is answered by the alerts.

US Flood Sentinel MCP Connector for Claude

A+

Know when US rivers are actually flooding: USGS gage heights checked against their flood stages, multi-day trends, and every active NWS flood alert nationwide — with since-based deltas so the agent re-checks and reports only what changed. Keyless, stateless.

6 tools Official Updated Oct 1, 2026 Official Vinkius Partner

More Details Connect to Claude

US Flood Sentinel answers the question nobody wants to learn the hard way: is my river (or a flood warning) actually moving right now? It joins two public US sources — USGS Water Data and the National Weather Service — into one stateless sentinel your agent can re-check on a schedule.

What you can do

Find the river you care about — stream gages in any US state, biggest drainage area first, name-filtered to a river or town (the gages that flood are the big ones)
Now-status of one gage — latest gage height against the flood stage on file, with a verdict: normal, within 1 ft of stage, or above flood stage
Multi-day trend — daily min/max/mean for the last N days, an overall direction verdict, and how many days the river ran over flood stage
Nationwide flood alerts — every active NWS flood alert (FloodWarning, FloodWatch, excess and coastal variants), or one event type only
What changed since I asked — pass the timestamp of your last check and get the alerts issued since then, split into still-active vs since-expired

How it works

Subscribe (no credential, no account — both APIs are public)
Ask "is anything flooding?" — one call returns the active alerts nationwide
For your river: find the gage, check its now-status and trend; keep the timestamp in context and re-run with since to get only the delta

Who is this for?

People near rivers and coasts — property owners, campers, boaters who want the water-level number, not just a news headline
Agents & automations — a scheduled flood pulse: alerts + your gage list, deltas only, no full re-reads
Emergency managers & planners — the all-events alert sweep and exceedance-day counts as machine-readable inputs

floodusgsnwsrivergagewateralertsentinelpublic-safety

6 tools expose this connector's capabilities to your AI agent.

current_gage

It also reports the thresholds on file. The USGS continuous feed is sparse, so a quiet gage answers with status no_data or stale_data and a note instead of a number — that is a finding, not an error. Pass the gage id from find_gages (USGS-########) or just the site number. Now-status of one USGS gage: latest gage height against its flood stage, with a verdict

gage_trend

The USGS daily summaries are sparse per gage: when a gage does not publish them the tool falls back to its continuous observations and says so in the note. Use it to answer "is the river still rising?" after current_gage shows a high reading. Multi-day gage-height trend for one USGS gage, with direction and flood-stage exceedance days

find_gages

Pass the state as a name ("California") or FIPS code (06); narrow with a river or place-name fragment. Each row carries the gage id that current_gage and gage_trend take as their gage parameter, plus the site number, name, county and drainage area. Find USGS stream gages in a US state, biggest drainage area first, optionally name-filtered

flood_alerts

Pass event to watch one type only. Zero results is a meaningful answer: no flood alert is active in the US right now. The agent should re-run this (or use flood_delta) at its next check to catch new issues. All active NWS flood alerts across the US, optionally one event type only

flood_delta

The NWS recent-alerts feed keeps only the newest alerts, so a baseline older than the feed window may miss some — the result says so. NWS flood alerts issued or updated since your last check, split into still-active vs since-expired

flood_watch

— the full list is returned) and it answers whether any of that type is active in the US right now, with the full alert details when there are some. A quiet result is "No <event> is active in the US right now." Scheduled watches run this one call per event type. Watch one NWS flood event type across the US: verdict plus the active alerts of that type

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