Elbe · km 55.6
Dresden gauge — Elbe water levels
Free-flowing The river runs free here, so the level is the constraint: this is where a drought actually binds a hull.
The free-flowing Elbe — the shallowest cruising river in the network, and the one that closes first. The reading is live PEGELONLINE; our bands here remain calibrated judgment.
Right now
Dresden Elbe
61 cm falling 2 centimetres over 72 hours falling 2 cm over 72 hours
low on mean low/high water (MNW/MHW) · normal on navigational reference levels (NSW/HSW) — the publisher's own classification of its own reading.
29 cm below the 90 cm calibrated judgment line. Waterlogged calibrated judgment line. A hand-set band, not a measured fairway depth and not worked out from any ship's draught. It is our judgment about this stretch and it is labelled as one.
A hand-set band, not a measured fairway depth and not worked out from any ship's draught. It is our judgment about this stretch and it is labelled as one.
Official forecasts and notices for this gauge
Linking is not endorsement. The publisher controls its own page, its own values and its own terms.
The official forecast for this gauge
BfG publishes no 14-day forecast for this gauge.
BfG's 6-week outlook for Dresden BfG issued this forecast: 2026-09-17
BfG's 6-week outlook for Dresden
Published by Bundesanstalt für Gewässerkunde (BfG). BfG issued this forecast: 2026-09-17.
Each line is one whole week, which is how BfG publishes this product. It gives no figure for any single day, and neither do we.
| Week | Lower | Middle | Upper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17–23 September | 46 | 55 | 66 |
| 24–30 September | 30 | 43 | 66 |
| 1–7 October | 30 | 50 | 97 |
| 8–14 October | 31 | 63 | 120 |
| 15–21 October | 43 | 79 | 140 |
| 22–28 October | 48 | 92 | 165 |
The three columns are BfG's own 5th, 50th and 95th percentiles from their weather-driven runs, in centimetres at the gauge.
Forecast water levels are from BfG. Waterlogged only reports historical and current data.
Every figure above is a water level at the gauge, in centimetres. It is not the depth of water under a ship and it is not a ship's draft.
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Dresden's own forecast page — opens Saxony's state flood centre
Saxony's own Dresden page. Below the measured table sits a forecast table headed with the hour it was made, giving a level in centimetres every three hours for about three days. The chart beside it shades the forecast range and the estimate beyond it.
Waterlogged does not reproduce or interpret the values on this page. The Saxon centre publishes these values as its own unchecked raw data and asserts its own copyright, so its forward figures are linked and never mirrored.
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Dresden's own forecast page — opens ELWIS
The waterways authority's own page for Dresden. It gives a level every two hours for roughly the next four days, and marks the later columns as an estimate rather than a forecast. The page names the hour the run was made.
ELWIS content is OpenData and its terms permit links to its pages when the source and the address “www.elwis.de” are named. Waterlogged copies nothing from this page.
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Official German federal six-week outlook (weekly means) — opens BfG
BfG publishes this as a trend statement in weekly means, six weeks ahead, not as day-by-day cruise guidance. It reaches Maxau, Kaub and Cologne on the Rhine, Pfelling and Hofkirchen on the Danube, and Dresden on the Elbe. Open the official product to read BfG's own figures and caveats.
This product is CC BY 4.0. Waterlogged may show the weekly means with the exact credit “Bundesanstalt für Gewässerkunde (BfG)” and the forecast's own issue date and time from the CSV header. We do not turn weekly means into per-day levels or passenger chances.
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PEGELONLINE — German federal waterways gauge service
The publisher of every German centimetre on this site, with its own station pages and its own classification of each reading.
History on this date
History on this date
The same-date history panel for this gauge is not available in this build.
This is measured history, not a forecast and not an estimate of disruption probability.
Rain in the next 14 days
Rhine above Kaub — representative catchment precipitation.
3 days: 0.8 mm · 7 days: 3.3 mm · 14 days: 3.3 mm — forecast precipitation.
Rain forecast by Open-Meteo (commercial licence), model icon_seamless · fetched 20 September 2026 at 06:46 UTC · covering 14 days, 20 September to 3 October.
Weather data by Open-Meteo (commercial licence) · Representative catchment precipitation total from 8 weighted sampling points; a point sample, not an areal mean.
Rain may slow a fall or create a rise after losses and routing. Waterlogged does not convert this forecast into gauge centimetres or a cruise-disruption probability.
Read a rain forecast at the source
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Deutscher Wetterdienst — official German weather forecasts
Germany's national weather service forecast for the Rhine, Main, Moselle and Danube catchments.
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yr.no — free European rain forecasts (MET Norway / NRK)
A free public forecast covering the same catchments, if you want rain amounts today.
Source, licence and limits
- Source: PEGELONLINE (WSV) — terms of use.
- Measurement time: every reading on this page shows the time it was taken, and a stale reading is flagged rather than reused.
- Transformation: the level is the publisher's. The gap, where one is shown, is Waterlogged's arithmetic and is labelled as such.
- Reference-data note: live PEGELONLINE station DRESDEN (WSV, DL-DE/Zero), station number 501060, gauge zero 102.7 m ü. NHN, confirmed live 31 Jul 2026 at 53 cm and 2 Aug 2026 at 55 cm (docs/waterway_sources_central_east.md §1); the official GlW 1991/2010 value and the reason it is not used as a depth-model pair are recorded in thresholds_cm.source_note
- Not for navigation. Nothing on this page should be used to plan the movement of a vessel.
Controlling gauge for the Elbe. The level is fetched live from the official PEGELONLINE station DRESDEN. The model remains THRESHOLD-ONLY and JUDGMENT-BASED, like Budapest, because no maintained-depth model has been transcribed; the UI must say so and feed loss suppresses the v2 split.
Spotted something wrong? How to report a correction · the full source matrix · this gauge in the threshold diary.
Where this gauge fits
The Dresden gauge is one of the Elbe gauges we read. To see it next to the others, with the same reading and the same 72-hour move for each, read today's Elbe water levels.
Worried about a booking rather than a number? Will my river cruise be cancelled because of low water? sets out what a low reading does and does not mean, and only the cruise line decides. To put these gauges against one particular sailing — your ports, in order, on your dates — start from the front page.