Iguazu Falls water flow right now

It changes every hour. The long-term average is about 1,500 cubic metres per second, but the river regularly runs at half that in a dry spell and several times that after heavy rain in the basin. The most recent hourly reading from the gauging station at the falls is 4,940 m³/s — 3.29× the average.

Anything between roughly 1,000 and 2,200 m³/s looks like the Iguazu of the postcards. Below about 900 m³/s the rock shelves start to show; above about 4,000 m³/s the spray becomes heavy enough to hide the far bank and the lowest walkways can close.

No. Low water changes the experience rather than cancelling it: you see more of the cliff structure, the individual falls separate into distinct curtains, photographs are clearer because there is less spray, and the walkways stay open. Very high water is more dramatic but often means less visibility and more closures.

From station 65992502 — officially "Hotel Cataratas — Copel" — on the Brazilian bank at the falls, in Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, draining 67,100 km² of basin. It is operated by Copel and its readings are published hourly through the public telemetry network of ANA, Brazil's National Water and Sanitation Agency. We read that public feed directly — nothing here is estimated.

Partly, and only for the next several hours. The same water passes gauging stations upstream before it reaches the falls: Porto Capanema about 13 hours earlier, the Salto Caxias dam about 21 hours earlier. You can see the order in their drainage areas, which only grow downstream: 57,100, 63,900 and 67,100 km². Comparing those readings gives a reliable direction for the next half day. Beyond that it depends on rain that has not fallen yet.

We re-check it against reality every hour. The page recalculates what it would have predicted for each of the last seven days and compares that to what the river actually did. Right now it has called the direction correctly 82% of the time across 212 hourly comparisons. The score is shown next to the trend, alongside what a naive "it will stay the same" guess would have scored.

It can. The walkways closest to the water — including the Devil's Throat balcony on the Argentinian side — are the first to close during major floods, and the decision belongs to each national park, not to us. Ordinary high water usually just means more spray and a poncho.

They can be, but river level alone does not tell you whether a boat operates on a given day. Operators suspend and resume on their own criteria and do not publish that status in real time. We confirm the operating status with them for your date rather than inferring it from a number.

On 9 June 2014 the river reached roughly 46,300 m³/s, about thirty times the historical average. There were smaller but still exceptional floods in October 2022 and October 2023, both of which closed walkways for days. For scale, today's reading is 9 times smaller than that record.

There is no single answer, because the basin has no reliable dry season. Higher flows are more common from October to March and lower flows from July to September, but both patterns break often. Checking the live reading a few days before you travel tells you more than any monthly average.

The station reports once an hour, and this page is rendered fresh on every visit, reading the telemetry feed at most ten minutes old. There is no cached copy of the number: what you see is the latest reading the network has published.