Viking River Cruises has not published which ship sails this departure.
Every water level below is measured against a line we work out for the ship class named above, using
its design How deep a ship sits in the water. That depth sets how much water it needs underneath. of 1.60 m.
That is our own assumption, not a figure from the cruise line. If Viking River Cruises names a ship
that sits deeper in the water, its line would be higher than the one drawn here.
Latest readings: Thursday 17 September 2026. Water levels change daily. Check again closer to your departure.
The Daily River Watch
Thursday 17 September 2026
River levels this morning — not the levels expected on your sailing dates
0ports far below the line
0ports below the line
0ports above the line
0ports on lock-controlled reaches
7ports with no line to compare
0ports on stretches we watch no gauge on
0ports with no river transit recorded
3ports where the ship is not sailing
What the statuses mean — each one is measured against the level we estimate a ship of this class needs
▼ Far below the lineThe measured level is under half of Waterlogged's reference line for a ship of this class.
▼ Below the lineThe measured level is below Waterlogged's reference line for a ship of this class. It is not yet under half that level.
✓ Above the lineThe measured level is at or above Waterlogged's reference line for a ship of this class.
⚓ Lock-controlledLocks hold the level on this stretch, so low water rarely stops a ship here. High water,
maintenance, closures, restrictions on the locks and the cruise line's own decision can still affect a day.
— No line publishedThe reading is real. Nobody publishes a level for this stretch to measure it against.
— No reading yetWe include this location on your daily schedule but there is no data available.
— No gauge on this stretchWe watch no gauge on this stretch of river. There is no reading for the day and no line
to measure one against. We are not telling you the water is fine, and we are not telling you anything
holds it at a working level — those are things we have not established here.
⚑ In portThe ship is in port on this day. Our record holds no river transit for it, so there is
no stretch of river to read. That is what we hold, not a claim about where the ship goes.
⌂ Not sailingThe ship does not sail on this day. Your itinerary spends it on land, so there is no
river level to read and no low-water question to answer.
A gauge level is not the depth of the navigable channel, not the room under your ship's keel,
and not your ship's draft. The rain forecast further down uses one more status of its own,
temporarily unavailable, when that feed is missing or out of date.
The official forward outlook
Waterlogged does not provide its own independent future river depth forecast. We show
today's gauge reading and compare them with our own reference lines and other historic
data. Where Waterlogged has received licenses, it includes river forecasts and clearly
identifies the sources where they are from. Waterlogged provides direct links to the gauge
forecasts from national providers. BfG has given us permission to show their six week
forecasts.
Your daily sailing schedule
Below are the ports you travel to and the depth of the water, as of today's date, and how much
water is needed for your ship to sail. A graph shows the median or normal river depth.
Two words will help. A A riverside station that measures the water level in centimetres against a fixed zero point. is a riverside station that
measures water level. Your ship's How deep a ship sits in the water. That depth sets how much water it needs underneath. is how deep it sits
in the water. This affects how much water it needs below the hull.
Day1–2
Paris
Wed 9 – Thu 10 December · France
⌂Not sailing
The ship does not sail on this day. Your itinerary spends it on land, so no river level applies to it.
The ship does not sail on this day.
Full details
Your itinerary spends this day on land. The ship is not sailing, so there is no stretch of river
under it and no water level that applies to it.
What the ship does
it does not sail on this day
Level reading
none applies — no river is being sailed
Sensitive to low water
not at all, on this day
Waterlogged reads river levels, and this day has none to read. What happens on it is a
question for your cruise line's own schedule, not for the water.
Day3
Reims; Trier
Friday 11 December
⌂Not sailing
The ship does not sail on this day. Your itinerary spends it on land, so no river level applies to it.
The ship does not sail on this day.
Full details
Your itinerary spends this day on land. The ship is not sailing, so there is no stretch of river
under it and no water level that applies to it.
What the ship does
it does not sail on this day
Level reading
none applies — no river is being sailed
Sensitive to low water
not at all, on this day
Waterlogged reads river levels, and this day has none to read. What happens on it is a
question for your cruise line's own schedule, not for the water.
Day4
Trier; Bernkastel
Saturday 12 December · France
—No line published
This is a real reading. There is nothing published to measure it against.
217272 cm
Scale 0–350 cm
217 cm measured
Nobody publishes a target level for this stretch, so there is nothing to measure the reading against. We show the reading and the direction, and nothing more.
Water level now (16 September)
217 cm
Normal for 12 December (median for 2000–2026)
272 cm
⬆Rising — the river level rose 1 cm in the last three days.
Water levels are measured at the Cochem gauge – German federal waterways gauge service (PEGELONLINE). No official data — the reading is official; there is simply nothing published to compare it against.
Current level
Past average for this date
Measured level below that line
Current and normal water levels. The solid blue line shows the current measured water level. The dashed grey line is the historic average of the water level from August 9th until December 12th. Today's water sits 7 cm below the normal water level for this date. During your shaded cruise dates the normal water level is 268 cm on 9 December and 272 cm on 20 December. The water level at this location historically keeps rising over the next three months.
Official forecast: Rhineland-Palatinate flood forecast centre — Cochem
Published by Hochwasservorhersagezentrale Rheinland-Pfalz.
No German federal forecast covers the Moselle. The state flood forecast centre for Rhineland-Palatinate is the one service that forecasts this gauge, and the button below opens Cochem's own page there.
Its own notice says a Cochem forecast is only possible above 241 cm, because weirs hold this water at a working level. Below that the chart shows a flat line rather than a forecast.
The risk this page is built for is high water, not low. For a day on this stretch, the thing to check is the notices — lock works and closures — rather than a level.
This is a real reading. There is nothing published to measure it against.
217274 cm
Scale 0–350 cm
217 cm measured
Nobody publishes a target level for this stretch, so there is nothing to measure the reading against. We show the reading and the direction, and nothing more.
Water level now (16 September)
217 cm
Normal for 13 December (median for 2000–2026)
274 cm
⬆Rising — the river level rose 1 cm in the last three days.
Water levels are measured at the Cochem gauge – German federal waterways gauge service (PEGELONLINE). No official data — the reading is official; there is simply nothing published to compare it against.
Current level
Past average for this date
Measured level below that line
Current and normal water levels. The solid blue line shows the current measured water level. The dashed grey line is the historic average of the water level from August 9th until December 12th. Today's water sits 7 cm below the normal water level for this date. During your shaded cruise dates the normal water level is 268 cm on 9 December and 272 cm on 20 December. The water level at this location historically keeps rising over the next three months.
Official forecast: Rhineland-Palatinate flood forecast centre — Cochem
Published by Hochwasservorhersagezentrale Rheinland-Pfalz.
No German federal forecast covers the Moselle. The state flood forecast centre for Rhineland-Palatinate is the one service that forecasts this gauge, and the button below opens Cochem's own page there.
Its own notice says a Cochem forecast is only possible above 241 cm, because weirs hold this water at a working level. Below that the chart shows a flat line rather than a forecast.
The risk this page is built for is high water, not low. For a day on this stretch, the thing to check is the notices — lock works and closures — rather than a level.
This is a real reading. There is nothing published to measure it against.
154 cm
Scale 0–250 cm
154 cm measured
Nobody publishes a target level for this stretch, so there is nothing to measure the reading against. We show the reading and the direction, and nothing more.
Water level now (16 September)
154 cm
⬆Rising — the river level rose 22 cm in the last three days.
Water levels are measured at the Würzburg gauge – German federal waterways gauge service (PEGELONLINE). No official data — the reading is official; there is simply nothing published to compare it against.
We do not draw a measured history graph for this gauge. The reading above is current and official; the archive the graph would be drawn from is not ours to republish.
Day7
Heidelberg
Tuesday 15 December · Germany
—No line published
This is a real reading. There is nothing published to measure it against.
154 cm
Scale 0–250 cm
154 cm measured
Nobody publishes a target level for this stretch, so there is nothing to measure the reading against. We show the reading and the direction, and nothing more.
Water level now (16 September)
154 cm
⬆Rising — the river level rose 22 cm in the last three days.
Water levels are measured at the Würzburg gauge – German federal waterways gauge service (PEGELONLINE). No official data — the reading is official; there is simply nothing published to compare it against.
We do not draw a measured history graph for this gauge. The reading above is current and official; the archive the graph would be drawn from is not ours to republish.
Day8
Würzburg
Wednesday 16 December · Germany
—No line published
This is a real reading. There is nothing published to measure it against.
154 cm
Scale 0–250 cm
154 cm measured
Nobody publishes a target level for this stretch, so there is nothing to measure the reading against. We show the reading and the direction, and nothing more.
Water level now (16 September)
154 cm
⬆Rising — the river level rose 22 cm in the last three days.
Water levels are measured at the Würzburg gauge – German federal waterways gauge service (PEGELONLINE). No official data — the reading is official; there is simply nothing published to compare it against.
We do not draw a measured history graph for this gauge. The reading above is current and official; the archive the graph would be drawn from is not ours to republish.
Day9
Bamberg
Thursday 17 December · Germany
—No line published
This is a real reading. There is nothing published to measure it against.
154 cm
Scale 0–250 cm
154 cm measured
Nobody publishes a target level for this stretch, so there is nothing to measure the reading against. We show the reading and the direction, and nothing more.
Water level now (16 September)
154 cm
⬆Rising — the river level rose 22 cm in the last three days.
Water levels are measured at the Würzburg gauge – German federal waterways gauge service (PEGELONLINE). No official data — the reading is official; there is simply nothing published to compare it against.
We do not draw a measured history graph for this gauge. The reading above is current and official; the archive the graph would be drawn from is not ours to republish.
Day10
Nuremberg; Prague
Friday 18 December · Germany
—No line published
This is a real reading. There is nothing published to measure it against.
154 cm
Scale 0–250 cm
154 cm measured
Nobody publishes a target level for this stretch, so there is nothing to measure the reading against. We show the reading and the direction, and nothing more.
Water level now (16 September)
154 cm
⬆Rising — the river level rose 22 cm in the last three days.
Water levels are measured at the Würzburg gauge – German federal waterways gauge service (PEGELONLINE). No official data — the reading is official; there is simply nothing published to compare it against.
We do not draw a measured history graph for this gauge. The reading above is current and official; the archive the graph would be drawn from is not ours to republish.
Day11–12
Prague
Sat 19 – Sun 20 December · Czechia
⌂Not sailing
The ship does not sail on this day. Your itinerary spends it on land, so no river level applies to it.
The ship does not sail on this day.
Full details
Your itinerary spends this day on land. The ship is not sailing, so there is no stretch of river
under it and no water level that applies to it.
What the ship does
it does not sail on this day
Level reading
none applies — no river is being sailed
Sensitive to low water
not at all, on this day
Waterlogged reads river levels, and this day has none to read. What happens on it is a
question for your cruise line's own schedule, not for the water.
Rain on your route — calculated daily
Rain forecast by Open-Meteo (commercial licence) · fetched 16 September 2026 at 05:16 UTC · covering 14 days, 16 September to 29 September.
Rain can raise the water level of a river but there is no fixed rule on how much it does.
We only report how much the quantity of rainfall has changed the water level before under
similar conditions. It is context, not a prediction of a river level.
●Licensed rain forecast + what the water level has actually done before
The detailed weather forecast for your route
All rain forecasts use the same scale, 0–12 mm of rain a day, so you
can compare them directly. Each column is one day, with its date at the top, then the sky for
that day and the daily high in °C.
Rain forecast by Open-Meteo (commercial licence) · fetched 16 September 2026 at 05:16 UTC · covering 14 days, 16 September to 29 September.
The rest of your route
That is why none of these has a rain forecast. What is left is the weather
for your day in town.
the same days · 16 September to 29 September · daily highs in °C
Rain forecast by Open-Meteo (commercial licence) · fetched 16 September 2026 at 05:16 UTC · covering 14 days, 16 September to 29 September.
How rain reaches the river — the rules we use
the stages, the half-lives and the 2003 warning behind every line above
How rain becomes a water level
A river responds to rain in stages. A nearby shower may matter less than rain far upstream.
Rain fallsWhere the rain lands matters as much as the total.
Ground takes a shareDry ground can hold most of the first rain.
Tributaries bring it downWater arrives from different Side rivers and streams that feed the main river at different times. at different times.
The gauge gets a pulseA A short rise that has travelled downstream after rain further up the river. can briefly raise the level at the gauge.
Baseflow settles itThe slow supply of stored water that keeps a river running between periods of rain. is the slower supply of stored water. It decides where the level settles.
Why winter rain often does more
Winter ground is usually wetter and cooler. Plants use less water then. Less water also
evaporates. More of the same rain can reach the river. In high summer, dry soil and growing
plants take more water first. Less water then flows over the land into the river.
What "half-life" means here
The How long half of an unusual water-level difference has historically taken to fade. is based on past records. It is the time for half the extra
height above the usual seasonal level to fade. It describes persistence, not how many
centimetres a storm will add.
Estimated half-life of unusual levels at eligible route gauges
Read the difference carefully. A longer summer value at the
Rhine gauges does not mean summer rain adds more water. It means an unusual measured level faded more
slowly in that set of calendar dates. The block names come from the parameter file; they are not
weather seasons or a rain-to-level formula.
Rules of thumb
Use these to read a wet outlook — not to predict a sailing-day level.
After a long dry period, the first roughly 10 mm may mainly soak the
soil. Do not expect much change at the gauge before that.
Source: waterlogged/rain_explainer.py → transfer_function.soil_absorption_first_mm.value_mm = 10; explicitly qualitative, not a fitted gauge coefficient.
Look downstream after about 1 day Basel–Maxau, 1–1½ days
Maxau–Kaub and ½–1 day Kaub–Cologne; Austrian Danube events spanned
60–118 hours, so there is no honest fixed Danube clock.
Sources: docs/council_alignment/lens_hydrology.md gives Rhine flood-wave and falling-water travel times. docs/climate_evidence_wide_signals.md gives the "Travel time & Alpine share" event range and the no-fixed-lag rule.
A routed rain pulse can briefly raise a gauge. Baseflow is the slower supply
of stored water. It decides where the level settles.
Source: waterlogged/rain_explainer.py gives the wording about a rain pulse in each season. The figures in the table above are the fitted half_life_days from drift_params.json.
That is the calculation you have just read. The licence turns this panel from
a list of links into a daily reading. It still stops where the evidence stops.
How to read every number on this page
"Water level now" is the authority's measured reading at the gauge named on this page. It uses centimetres from that The fixed zero point for a gauge's centimetre scale. It can sit above the riverbed.. It is a level, not a depth of water under your ship. It is not the depth of the The navigable channel where ships are meant to pass. either, and it is not your ship's How deep a ship sits in the water. That depth sets how much water it needs underneath..
"Water level a ship of this class needs" — written WLSN at each end of its bold dashed line on the graphs — is Waterlogged's own arithmetic on published reference figures for that stretch and the draft we assume for that class. It is our line, plainly labelled, and it is not the operator's decision to sail.
The seasonal graph shows two different things. Left of the today line, solid blue shows the levels that were measured. Right of it, the dashed line shows the historical average for each date. It comes from what these gauges recorded on that date in past years. It is not a forecast of this autumn, and we do not draw one. We show it because that average keeps falling through October. That is useful to know before you sail.
Where a line comes from the record — Budapest — the page says so. There is still no maintained-depth model published for the Hungarian Danube, so instead of guessing at one we set our level from what actually happened: in 35 years of readings, every cruise-season day below it fell within a disruption somebody documented at the time.
Where no mark exists — Kienstock — we show the reading and the official marks and stop there.
Where the numbers come from. Measured levels for Kaub, Cologne, Pfelling and
Hofkirchen are verified daily averages from Germany's official service for live and archived federal waterway gauge readings.. They cover 2015–2026 and
are topped up from the live archive. Budapest and Kienstock readings come through The European River Information Services portal. It republishes official river data from member countries.
and Austria's Danube River Information Services site for water levels and navigation notices.. For those two the solid line on the graph is drawn from our own recording of
that live feed, which began in July 2026, so it is short and grows by a day each day; the graph says where it starts.
The longer measured archive behind Kienstock is not ours to republish, so we do not draw it and we print no
record sentence for it. For Budapest that changed on 17 August 2026: the General Directorate of Water Management
gave us written permission to publish its own archive, and the average for each date now stands on
35 years of it. Each "normal for this date"
uses a 31-day circular The middle past value for that date. Half of past years were higher and half were lower. — the middle value, so half of past years were
higher and half lower. The averages use 12 years of records on the German gauges,
35 years on Budapest and 25 years on Kienstock, from the projection engine's own
doy_median_cm arrays. Record lines use an eleven-day window centred on the port's own date, across each
gauge's whole archive. Budapest's levels come from Országos Vízügyi Főigazgatóság (OVF) / General Directorate of
Water Management; where we work them into an average, those input data originate from the General Directorate of
Water Management.
Nothing here is a forecast. The trend and the graph describe measured moves that have already happened. We do not model your cruise and we do not give you a percentage chance of anything.
The numbers on this page stay free.
You are not paying for anything. The daily update — which includes a river companion on your sailing — is free to your inbox.
If you want us to read this sailing every morning and send it to your inbox, the Daily River Log Watch is free for your sailing. Nothing to pay, nothing renews. The last morning is the morning after you leave the ship.
Every morning until the morning after you leave the ship: the reading on the gauge that governs your stretch, what changed overnight, and the river companion — the story of the water you are sailing on. Free.
Keep my email for this sailing only, so Waterlogged can send me the Daily River Log Watch for it each morning, free, until the morning after the sailing ends. No marketing and no sale of my address. Stop any time by replying stop, or delete my address on request; it is deleted no later than 180 days after the scheduled sailing. Privacy details: /privacy.
