Snoflo Products · The Map

Every river in America, live on one map.

Snoflo Map fuses NOAA's National Water Model, USGS gauges, USDA snowpack telemetry, and marine forecast systems into a single real-time picture of American water, from summit snow to ocean swell. Built for the people who work on water and the people who play on it.

1.4Mriver reaches with hourly modeled flow
35+live data layers on one canvas
±72hmarine replay and forecast scrubbing
184msmeasured interaction latency at national scale
Live discharge, colored by flow · refreshed every hour from the National Water Model
1 cfs101001k10k100k300k+
The one-minute case

Public data is world class. Using it is not.

Federal agencies publish the best water and weather data on earth, then scatter it across dozens of portals, formats, and file servers that only specialists can navigate.

Snoflo unifies it. One map carries modeled flow for 1.4 million river reaches, ten thousand federal gauges, mountain snowpack, reservoir storage, coastal wave and current fields, flood zones, wildfire hazard, and the emergency infrastructure that responds when water becomes risk. It refreshes itself every hour, around the clock, with no analyst in the loop.

The business underneath is deliberately simple. The inputs are public and free. The tile and compute pipeline is self-hosted, so serving one more user costs close to nothing. Recreation brings a large audience in at the top, professional depth keeps them subscribed, and the same product ships on web and iOS from one data backbone.

Two markets, one productA consumer-scale recreation audience and a professional tier for engineering, hydrology, and emergency planning, on the same map.
Near-zero marginal costPublic data in, self-hosted tiles out. The serving stack was engineered to make the next million map loads cheap.
Compounding data moatEvery hourly build adds replay history no late entrant can backfill.
Differentiators

What no other consumer map ships

These are not incremental features. Each one is a capability that, to our knowledge, has never been packaged for the public in a single interactive map.

01

Flow between the gauges

America has roughly ten thousand active federal streamgauges and millions of river miles. Snoflo renders NOAA's National Water Model on 1.4 million reaches, updated hourly, so the creek with no gauge for fifty miles still reports its flow. Tap any blue line in the country and read discharge and velocity.

First to market
02

Summit to surf, one canvas

Water is one connected system and Snoflo treats it that way. Snowpack telemetry feeds into river flow, river flow into reservoir storage, and the coastline picks up with wave height, wave energy, surface currents, and buoy observations. No other product follows the water across that whole arc.

Category defining
03

A time machine for the coast

The marine layers replay the past 72 hours and scrub 72 hours into the forecast, hour by hour, with a live wind particle field animating conditions on screen. Swell partitions break out each arriving train the way professional surf forecasters see it.

Consumer first
04

Professional overlays, consumer price

FEMA flood zones, wildfire hazard potential, watershed boundaries, principal aquifers, plus the response layer: hospitals, shelters, fire and police stations, power transmission lines, and cell towers. Data that normally lives in enterprise GIS seats is here at a consumer subscription.

10x price advantage
The water path

Follow a drop across the country

Snowpack

SNOTEL telemetry and modeled snow depth across every western basin, with season-over-season history.

USDA · NOAA

Rivers

Hourly modeled discharge on 1.4 million reaches plus live federal gauge readings, colored by flow.

NOAA NWM · USGS

Reservoirs

Storage, dam specs, and current levels for the infrastructure that manages the runoff.

USBR · USACE

The coast

Wave height and energy, wind, surface currents, and live buoys, with replay and forecast.

GFS-Wave · RTOFS · NDBC
Who it serves

Professional depth, recreational reach

The same map answers a site engineer at 9am, a district hydrologist at noon, and a kayaker checking flows for the weekend.

Engineering & response

Civil · Site assessment · Emergency planning
  • FEMA flood zone boundaries with zone class and base flood elevations
  • Wildfire hazard potential shading for exposure screening
  • Hospitals, shelters, fire and police stations for response planning
  • Power transmission lines, cell towers, major roads, and runways

Hydrology & water resources

Basins · Supply · Forecasting
  • HUC-8 watershed boundaries and principal aquifer extents
  • Gauge observations side by side with modeled flow, hourly
  • Snow water equivalent, drought index, and precipitation timelines
  • Reservoir storage and dam attributes in one tap

Recreation

Paddle · Fish · Surf · Ski
  • Live flows and 15-day forecasts on every named river
  • Surf spots with swell partitions, buoys, and wind
  • Ski areas, SNOTEL depth, and powder timelines
  • Campgrounds, ramps, trails, peaks, and parks with conditions attached
Under the hood

Built like infrastructure, not a demo

Rendering the entire national river network in a browser tab is an engineering problem before it is a design problem. We solved it with the discipline of a mapping company, not a dashboard vendor.

Hourly, unattendedAutomated builds harvest federal feeds, bake tiles, and publish every hour with atomic swaps and integrity checks. No analyst in the loop.
1.4M features, in-browserTyped-array joins bind live flow values to the national reach network client-side, keeping pans and zooms at a measured 184 ms interaction latency.
Self-hosted tile pipelineVector and raster tiles are built and served from our own stack with immutable caching, which is why marginal serving cost stays near zero.
Flow-aware cartographyDetail ladders by discharge, not just geometry, so the Mississippi reads at national zoom while headwater creeks arrive as you zoom in.
Physics on canvasThe wind and current particle fields animate real model vectors at 60 frames per second without paid rendering features.
One backbone, two clientsWeb and iOS share the same tilesets and data services, so every layer ships to both platforms from a single pipeline.
NOAA NATIONAL WATER MODELUSGS NWISUSDA SNOTELNOAA GFS-WAVENOAA RTOFSNDBC BUOYSFEMA NFHLUSFS WILDFIRE HAZARDEPA NHDPLUSHIFLD