Moose Jaw River level

Whether the Moose Jaw River is running high right now, from the live gauge just east of the city, with the spring-runoff authority to watch.

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Town Tools builds free, public tools for Moose Jaw and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.

Worth knowing

Where this reading comes from

The gauge sits just east of the city at Burdick, where the Moose Jaw River leaves town after winding south through Wakamow Valley below the Kingsway Dam. It shows what the river is carrying away from Moose Jaw — a good read on the whole catchment above town. The level is metres above sea level (a survey datum), so watch how it moves rather than the number itself. Flow, in cubic metres per second, is the plainer measure of how much water is coming down.

Why the flow reads zero all summer

This is a prairie river, not a mountain one. Outside the spring melt the Moose Jaw River barely moves. The monthly average flow at this gauge in August was 0.012 m³/s in 2023, 0.027 in 2024 and 0.002 in 2025 — next to April averages of 27.7, 1.7 and 6.7 in the same three years. A flow reading of 0.0 in July, August or the depth of winter is therefore the river behaving normally and the gauge working fine, not a broken feed. The level in metres keeps drifting even when the flow reads zero, because there is still standing water in the channel. What this page is really for is the other end of the year. Watch it from March, when the snow starts going.

Spring runoff is the season to watch

This is a prairie river with a low, quiet flow most of the year that climbs with the March–May snowmelt. The Water Security Agency publishes a runoff outlook each spring and issues high-flow advisories when the melt is fast — that outlook, not this gauge, is the thing to follow when the snow goes.

The flood Moose Jaw still measures against

In April 1974 a fast snowmelt and ice-jammed channels put much of the city under several feet of water — still the benchmark flood here. The low, valley areas along the river, including the Wakamow trails, are the first to go under when the river runs high.