Guatemala River Levels Today: 45 INSIVUMEH Gauges, Live

INSIVUMEH measures 45 river and lake gauges across Guatemala and publishes the readings every day — as three PDFs, in Spanish, typeset so that the words run together when you copy them. This page reads all three and puts every station in one table, with the one comparison the bulletin itself makes possible: is this level inside the range INSIVUMEH calls normal for this station, or outside it?

The stations that are not in their normal range

That is the short list. Everything below it is the full network.

How to read a row

The normal range is not a flood stage. INSIVUMEH’s own footnotes at the bottom of every bulletin define the two numbers by how often a flow occurs, not by when water reaches a bridge deck:

Se define el caudal mínimo como el caudal observado que no excede el 10% de ocurrencia durante su período de registro.

Se define el caudal máximo como el caudal observado que excede el 90% de ocurrencia durante su período de registro.

So a level above the normal maximum means this is in the top tenth of what this gauge usually sees. That is a useful thing to know and it is not the same as a warning. The warning product is separate, and the bulletin points at it in its own last column — see below.

The level is a scale reading, not a depth. The bulletin says so directly:

Las lecturas de los niveles de las escalas son de referencia y son independientes de la profundidad del río.

Which is why some stations read negative. Panajax on the Las Vacas at Sanarate, El Progreso, was at -1.02 m in bulletin 785 of 2026. The river is not below the ground; the staff gauge just has its zero somewhere above the water that day. Compare a station only against its own range, never against another station’s.

The trend column is the one that moves first. Disminuir, Mantenerse, Incrementar — falling, holding, rising. During a storm a level still inside its normal range but marked Incrementar is the early state of the thing you are worried about. A level already outside its range and marked Disminuir is the tail of it.

Where INSIVUMEH’s own note disagrees with the arithmetic, believe the note. In bulletin 785 of 2026, 17 stations carried an observation. Fifteen of them also fell outside the published normal range, so the two agreed. Two did not: San Juan Gascón on the Pensativo at Antigua Guatemala sat at exactly 0.0 m against a normal minimum of exactly 0.0 m, and Puente Chocox on the Chixoy at Canillá, Quiché sat at exactly 0.56 m against a minimum of 0.56 m. Arithmetic calls both “within normal”. INSIVUMEH’s hydrologist wrote Río Bajo on both. The table prints both columns for that reason.

The Chixoy hydroelectric reservoir has its own page: Chixoy reservoir level and power limit, from the grid operator’s daily reports.

The full network, by watershed

What the gauges are

They are physical staff gauges read by observers, not automatic telemetry. INSIVUMEH describes the network’s job as measuring and monitoring the levels of rivers and lakes, and explains why a level is worth publishing at all:

La importancia de las estaciones de monitoreo radica en que nos dan un dato de nivel del agua que fluye en una sección determinada y su evolución en el tiempo, insumo necesario para la obtención de caudales a través de análisis realizados por profesionales de la hidrología.

Every bulletin prints the two people behind it: Monitoreado por: José Quexel, Analizado por: Lobsang Méndez. INSIVUMEH’s interactive station map states that the daily reporting hours are 07:00, 13:00 and 17:00 local, and uses three colours:

Los colores de las estaciones dentro del mapa representan lo siguiente: rojo (Río crecido), amarillo (Río bajo), otro color (Río en estado normal), dando clic en alguna estación podrás observar los niveles registrados.

The flood products this bulletin points at

The daily bulletin’s last column is headed No. BHE, and it is a cross-reference. When a station triggers a flood bulletin, its number lands there. In bulletin 785 of 2026 exactly one station carried one: Chachaclún, on Lago Petén Itzá, reference 1336-2025.

The two forecast products are the decision-support ones, and both come from the Central America Flash Flood Guidance System. The flash-flood index is, in INSIVUMEH’s words:

Guía de inundaciones repentinas que estima el volumen total de lluvia continua durante 6 horas para condiciones de banca llena. Volúmenes de lluvia de la misma duración, que son mayores a este valor, indican una probabilidad de crecidas.

And the crecida forecast reduces the same question to a single number you can read off a map:

El índice de desbordamiento, es la relación entre el límite de precipitación que soporta la cuenca y la precipitación acumulada pronosticada en 24 horas. Los valores superiores a uno (1), indican posibles crecidas y/o desbordamientos.

Above one means possible overflow. That is the cleanest threshold in Guatemala’s whole hydrological output, and it is published as a map image on a Spanish-language page most readers never reach.

One honest limit: BHE.pdf is a scanned image. We fetch it successfully every run, and it contains no extractable text at all — so this page links it rather than quoting it. The machine-readable hook is the No. BHE column above.

What this page does not tell you

• It is not a warning. Alert colours are CONRED’s, and who may declare which colour is set out on our emergency alerts page and in the mechanics on weather alerts.
• It is not a forecast. Rain that has not fallen yet is INSIVUMEH’s crecida forecast, above. Where the rain is coming from is on the hurricane tracker, and how much normally falls each month is on rainfall by month.
• It is not the lake level everyone asks about. Lago de Atitlán has no gauge in this bulletin — its own gauge, and the gap in it, are on Lake Atitlán water level.
• If a road is your actual question, a swollen river usually reaches you as a closure first: road closures.

In an emergency the number is 119 — CONRED’s own line, as it prints it:

Reportar cualquier emergencia al número 119 de CONRED.

INSIVUMEH’s own line, 2310-5000, is an office number: Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00.

How this page is built and when it updates

• Source: INSIVUMEH, Boletín diario de hidrología aplicada — BHVP.pdf, BHVC.pdf and BHVGM.pdf, all listed on the boletín diario page.
• Every level, flow, trend and observation in the table is INSIVUMEH’s published value. The only column we compute is “against normal”, and it compares the bulletin’s own current level with the bulletin’s own normal range.
• Column positions are read from each bulletin’s own header row, not hard-coded. If INSIVUMEH changes the layout, the parse yields nothing and the page shows the last good bulletin with a visible stale badge, rather than shifted numbers.
• A failed fetch never overwrites good data. A watershed whose PDF cannot be read keeps its previous bulletin and is marked as not refreshed.
• Cadence: the bulletin is republished daily at the same three URLs and we re-read it on each daily data run. Bulletin 785 of 2026, stamped 19/09/2026 14:00, was the current issue on 20 September 2026.
• Sources and captures for every quotation on this page: content/research/river-levels-2026-09-20.md.