UPDATE: 14 levees have broken in Missouri, but that will help downstream, keeping the Mississippi above 1993 heights. Want to know how the flood will affect the economy and you? Read this article. I added a link to our Forums, a new AP Photo, and an animation of the flood gauges below.

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Blog reader Kristina left a comment on the Iowa Tornado Photo blog entry asking this question: "Does anyone out there have an idea on where I could get real-time information the extent of the Midwest floods?" Julie, here's your answer.

First, while the floods are ongoing, our Weather Headlines (PREMIUM | PRO) and Breaking Weather News Page (PREMIUM | PRO) usually contain some information every day. This usually shows some simple but helpful graphics such as this one.

If we don't have enough info for you, you can visit Google News for the latest flooding information, from national cable outlets to local newspapers. (Most major TV cable news outlets are monitoring the situation as well). You can also check out the "500 Year Storm Thread" on the AccuWeather.com Forums, where folks just like you are talking about the floods.

As far as monitoring the locations which are flooding, or will flood, you can visit the government's AHPS site which shows the stages of river gauges across the nation. Click below to play an animation of the river gauge statuses, every hour since June 1st.

These gauges go up and down when the water rises and falls, and they are colored by their "stages", for example "Near Flood Stage" means that the water in the river is about to spill over its banks. As you can see this morning from the map above, 122 gauges are indicating flooding condition, with 38 of them "major flooding." This may not necessarily mean that the river's height has never been higher at that location, but it means that large parts of the surrounding land are under water. Note that they also have a River Forecasts tab which shows the expected stages of the rivers in the next 48 hours (since flooding travels slowly over a major river such as the Mississippi, that map won't look a whole lot different). If you click on the map to zoom in (turn on counties and cities below the map if you get discombobulated), you can click on a dot for an individual river gauge, for example check out the Illinois River at Hardin this morning. This graph tells you several important things.

One, it shows you the other stages on the graph - as you can tell, we are far above Flood Stage - it's off the map. According to the text at the bottom, at the current stage of 33.7 feet, "River Road in Bedford is overtopped. Also this level is expected to be met or exceeded on average once every 10 years." Also shown (green line) is the government's forecast, which says that the river will "crest" at 35.7 feet on Monday (see what I mean about how slow flooding can be?). At this point "This level is expected to be met or exceeded on average once every 25 years" and if the forecast is off by a foot, "The Nutwood Levee is overtopped." As their disclaimer says, the graphs are "guidance only" and you should click on "View all valid statements/warnings" at the top of their page to get a forecast for any particular location you may be interested in.

The USGS has a similar page, and it's never been clear to me what the differences are between the USGS page and AHPS. The USGS page contains much less data in general, but it seems to have some stream and creek gauges that the AHPS interface does not, for example here in Central PA, the USGS has 5 gauges and AHPS only has one, though the difference doesn't appear to be as large for other areas. In any case, on the USGS site you aren't going to get as detailed information as AHPS.

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