@pipeworx/uk-flood-monitoring

England's official flood warnings and river-gauge telemetry, from the Environment Agency's real-time flood-monitoring API.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1857+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• ukflood_warnings(min_severity?, county?, limit?) — flood warnings and alerts currently in force, with severity, named flood area, river or sea, and the EA message text. Answers "is there a flood warning near X".

• ukflood_stations_near(latitude, longitude, radius_km?, parameter?, river?, limit?) — monitoring stations near a point and the measures each reports. This is where you get the station id for the next tool.

• ukflood_station_readings(station_id, since?, limit?) — water level (m), river flow (m³/s) or rainfall (mm) from one station, latest per measure by default, or a time series with since.

• ukflood_areas(county?, search?, latitude?, longitude?, radius_km?, limit?) — the named flood areas warnings are issued against, so a warning code resolves to a place.

Related MCP server: mcp-usgs-water-data

Auth

Keyless. Open Government Licence v3.

Data sources

• https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring/id/floods — warnings in force.

• https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring/id/stations — station registry, filterable by lat/long/dist (km), parameter, riverName.

• https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring/id/stations/{id}/readings — telemetry; ?latest for the newest reading per measure, ?since= for a series.

• https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring/id/floodAreas — flood-area registry.

• Reference: https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring/doc/reference

Things worth knowing:

• England only. Wales (Natural Resources Wales), Scotland (SEPA) and Northern Ireland publish separately. A Cardiff or Glasgow query legitimately returns nothing.

• Zero warnings is a normal state, not a failure. On a dry day /id/floods returns items: [], and that matched the Environment Agency's own public page ("No flood alerts") when this pack was built. ukflood_warnings therefore returns severity counts and an explicit all-clear status alongside the empty list, so a caller can tell "nothing is happening" from "the call broke".

• The API returns JSON-LD. @id fields are URIs; the pack hands back the last path segment, which is the notation callers actually pass back in.

• label is occasionally an array rather than a string.

• floodAreas has no text-search parameter; search is applied client-side after over-fetching, so combine it with county on large counties.

• Different source from the flood pack, which is Open-Meteo's global modelled river discharge. This one is measured gauges and official warnings.

Verified

2026-09-17 — stations near London, readings from 5380TH (Walthamstow, Low Hall, River Lee) and Lincolnshire flood areas all returned rows; warnings returned a cross-checked genuine all-clear.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-flood-monitoring": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uk-flood-monitoring/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uk-flood-monitoring/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1857+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ukflood_warnings \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"min_severity":4}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ukflood_warnings. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-uk-flood-monitoring is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uk-flood-monitoring/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-flood-monitoring": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-uk-flood-monitoring"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Uk Flood Monitoring data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT