Waterways

There are a lot of concerns about the river levels since last years drought. I can see this due to the web site statistics. And it is an important questions for a lot of people in river cruise forums. People interested in cruising Europe want to know the the water level for a particular month, and are sometimes really disappointed when they learn that it is too hard to say. WHY is it so hard to predict the river levels? Therefore I try to provide some background information on watersheds, river courses and the main areas where the cruiseable rivers in Europe draw their water from.

While the last season of river cruising (2010) was mainly dominated by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull vulcano, the topic of 2011 were the extremly low water levels in western europe. The Danube river had a 200 years low in Hungary, and 45.000 citizens of the german city of Koblenz had to be evacuated in order to defuse an air mine (also named 'Block Buster' due the 1.8tons weight) from World War 2.

UPDATE: This list is fairly outdated. The easiest way to check waterlevels is this: Click a river, then the Tab "Waterlevels". Or you click on the Overview and select a river :)