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A small neural network watches the last 48 hours of 1 km radar rainfall over every square of the Cossatot watershed above the Vandervoort gauge — plus the river's own recent behavior — and projects the level forward hour by hour. It was trained on 12 years of storms and validated against every year it never saw. The crossing alerts come from a companion gradient-boosted model, calibrated on the same held-out years, which is the validated alert; the level table is context.
Based only on rain that has already fallen. If more rain falls, these numbers become the floor, not the forecast — the model re-issues every hour as new radar arrives. Experimental: trust the main dashboard and your own judgment first.
| Time | Predicted | (cfs) | Likely range |
|---|---|---|---|
| +1 hr (6:00 AM) | 1.83 ft | 4 | 1.83 – 1.83 ft |
| +2 hr (7:00 AM) | 1.83 ft | 4 | 1.83 – 1.83 ft |
| +3 hr (8:00 AM) | 1.83 ft | 4 | 1.83 – 1.83 ft |
| +4 hr (9:00 AM) | 1.83 ft | 4 | 1.83 – 1.83 ft |
| +5 hr (10:00 AM) | 1.83 ft | 4 | 1.83 – 1.83 ft |
| +6 hr (11:00 AM) | 1.83 ft | 4 | 1.83 – 1.83 ft |
Model notes this hour: low-flow hold: below 10 cfs with no rain in 48 h the gauge's own resolution is coarser than the model's move, so the table shows no change (validated on held-out years); Cossatot gauge last posted 14 min before this run.
Predicted value is the model's median, nudged toward “no change” in dry spells; below 10 cfs with no rain the table simply holds the current level, and the likely range is never narrower than the gauge's own reporting step. The likely range spans the model's 25th–75th percentile, sized to contain the truth about half the time. Feet are converted from predicted flow with USGS's current shift-adjusted rating for the gauge (fetched 2026-09-08). On that rating the 240-cfs floatable line sits at 3.46 ft and the 1,270-cfs high-water line at 5.38 ft (the tier labels keep the site's round numbers). Green = floatable and red = above the recommended maximum, coloured only while the crossing model's alert is up. A percentage is shown only when an alert is up (validated on held-out years: about 9 in 10 floatable rises get an alert in the 6 hours before, and about 9 in 10 alert episodes verify). Model: cossatot-pixel-v6b, the same architecture as the Buffalo neural net, running on-site — no cloud services. Curious how it works? Understand the math →