USGS stream flow gages for MO rivers

Here's a Weblink to the USGS National Water Information System for Missouri's rivers & streams. Many of the rivers and streams in the US have permanent automated gaging stations that send real time data to the internet. You can view & download reports on current and past river conditions in several formats. Regretably, this program has been underfunded for years and there are many rivers that don't have a gage that should have one, but who knows you might get lucky with your particular monitoring site.

It's really handy to be able to look on the internet and see what the river is doing and what it has done in the past. It can save you a trip to a distant monitoring site if you look it up and find it to be in a flash flooding condition and worth waiting until it goes down again. Also, it can shorten your data collection significantly if your stream flow rate is already known and from a reliable source
I have my WQM sites saved to "favorites" or bookmarked, and here is an example from Watkins Creek in North St. Louis County

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/mo/nwis/uv/?site_no=07001985&agency_cd=USGS

The search process is a little daunting, but with tenacity you should be able to find what you are looking for and more. There have been times in the past when this program got more money, and so in many cases you have access to a lot of Water Quality Monitoring data collected and delivered from a very professional source- the USGS water quality technicians. This can be great if you have a new site and want to see what the water quality picture looked like in past years. For instance:
http://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/mo/nwis/qwdata/?site_no=07001985&agency_cd=USGS

Some of the sites are still being actively monitored four times a year, so you can frequently find water chemistry data that can support or question your own data collection.

There's another river gage site I've been going to a lot, lately, to see what is happening with the floods. NOAA has a really nice site for flood status and prediction and much of the eastern Missouri river systems can be found here :
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ahps2/index.php?wfo=lsx
Click on one of the square dots in the interactive map to see what's happening and what is likely to happen at that particular location and river.

Here is what the national picture looks like:
http://www.weather.gov/ahps/

Different river systems are handled by different forecasting centers for different parts of the state. So here is the interactive map that can take you to the center that covers your neck of the woods:
http://www.weather.gov/ahps/rfc/rfc.php