Weather alert
Open the live radar →
KBN GEOWeather
Reading the Kerr County stations…
the surface
The column over Kerrville
Weather here is only half the story. The other half is what it becomes in the Guadalupe. This page reads the air from the top down — how much water it is carrying, how high the cloud deck sits, what the barometer is doing — and finishes at the river.
Two numbers decide whether air has to give water up: its temperature, and the temperature at which it would be full. The gap between them is all that is holding the rain in.
Reading the Kerr County stations…
Reading the stations…
the ceiling
How low the cloud deck is sitting
feet above the ground
Reading the cloud base…
These are the symbols a surface analysis chart has used for a century. Every mark is a measured value, not a picture of the weather.
the fuel
How much energy the air is carrying
Air can be hot and dry or cool and soaking, and neither temperature nor dew point alone tells you how much a storm has to work with. Equivalent potential temperature — theta-e — rolls heat and moisture into one number. Each mark is a station reporting right now.
the barometer
What the pressure has done today
Reading the barometer…
Reading the barometer…
what fell
What has already landed
Reading the volunteer gauges…
CoCoRaHS — the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network.
ahead
Chance of rain, period by period
National Weather Service, Austin/San Antonio. Lighter blocks are daytime periods, darker are overnight. For watches and warnings as they are issued, see the live map.
the river
Where it ends up
Everything above is weather. This is the part that reaches a low-water crossing, read upstream to downstream, with the two gauged creeks set where they join.
Reading the river gauges…
Each bar runs from zero to that gauge’s major-flood level on its own datum, with ticks at the action, minor and moderate thresholds. The levels are published by the Upper Guadalupe River Authority; the readings are live from USGS.
Two of these gauges cannot measure a flood even so: above Bear Creek tops out at 399 cfs and Center Point at 600, in a river that has run to six figures. Their stage keeps reporting after their discharge has stopped meaning anything, so read the feet, not the flow.
The gauged Cypress Creek is at Saur Farm near Comfort. The Cypress Creek that joins the South Fork at Camp Mystic is a different creek, and it has no gauge.