Flooding of Accotink Creek and Flood Data from nearby Gauges

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's National Weather Service maintains a website with current data measuring water levels at hundreds of river gauges around the country.  The two closest gauges to Accotink Creek are on the Potomac River near Washington D.C. at Little Falls, MD and on the Potomac River in Georgetown (in Washington, DC).  By going to the following web page https://water.weather.gov/ahps/ and selecting Virginia, you can then zoom in on Fairfax County and finally find Sally Ormsby Park with Accotink Creek running through it.

By Zooming out a bit, you find the two aforementioned gauges.  Below is a map that shows the Little Falls gauge with its current water levels.

As you can see, the river is well below flood level now, largely because of the drought of the last 6 weeks, when the Greater Washington DC area has received very little rain.  The next map shows the probability of floods at this gauge in the next month.

The above graph shows that the chances of reaching even lower flood levels during the next month are less than 10%.

I also examined the data on the Georgetown gauge location of the Potomac River.  Below is a graph of river levels at that gauge.

What is noteworthy here is that the water levels of the Potomac in Georgetown rise and fall twice a day.  This is undoubtedly because of tidal action on the river.

An additional piece of information on the website for Georgetown is that it shows inundation areas.  Below is the photo from today.

You can see that there are no areas near the river that are currently inundated, but during a flood, they would be captured on this satellite image.

A search for recent flooding on Accotink Creek resulted in a Patch.com article about flooding on July 24, 2018.  Warnings were sent out to subscribers of the Patch site that the creek had flooded Woodburn Road in Annandale (not far from Sally Ormsby Park) .  Below is a photo of an abandoned car on Woodburn Road during that flood.

Steve Chenevey Fox5

The full story of this flood on Accotink Creek can be found at https://patch.com/virginia/annandale/moving-flood-waters-trap-car-annandale-photos .