How high the sea is at Pärnu right now, against the Weather Service's own warning levels for this town — and what the January 2005 flood actually reached.
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Pärnu Bay is shallow and narrow and opens straight into the strongest storm winds in the Baltic. That is why the water is 22 °C in July and why the town floods in January.
This page reads the water level at the Pärnu coastal station every few minutes and puts it beside the Estonian Weather Service's own warning levels for this town. The summer number is usually a few tens of centimetres and means nothing at all; the number that matters arrives on a winter night with a west wind behind it.
Right now
The sea is at a normal level.
140 cm below the first warning level (180 cm) · measured · the Riigi Ilmateenistus coastal station in Pärnu itself, at the river mouth
The reading is live from the Estonian Weather Service’s gauge. The warning levels are the Estonian Weather Service’s own published criteria for this town, which it publishes once rather than in the feed — the source and the date we checked it are below.
Source: Riigi Ilmateenistus — hoiatuste kriteeriumid (warning criteria), checked 1 August 2026 (today).
Sea temperature at the same gauge: 20.9 °C
The storm surge in Pärnu Bay reached about 275 cm and the flood maximum in the city about 272 cm on the night of 9 January, the highest since systematic observation began in 1923. The previous record, about 253 cm, had stood since 1967. The shoreline moved as much as a kilometre inland across densely built streets, one elderly resident died, and national losses came to roughly 0.7% of Estonia's GDP.
Source: Suursaar et al., Boreal Environment Research 11: 143 — cyclone Gudrun and its hydrodynamic consequences, checked 1 August 2026 (today).
Estonia moved its heights to the EH2000 (Amsterdam) datum in 2018. Nothing changed in the water; the printed numbers got bigger. At Pärnu the difference was reported at about 19 cm, and the Weather Service's own critical level for the town moved from 160 cm on the old Kronstadt datum to 180 cm on the new one. So Gudrun's 275 cm belongs on the old scale — roughly 295 cm in the numbers this page shows. Read it as the size of the event, not as a figure to compare centimetre for centimetre with the reading above.
Source: Riigi Ilmateenistus — merevee tasemed uues kõrgussüsteemis (2018), checked 1 August 2026 (today).
The Estonian coast has been rising out of the sea since the ice left, and that land uplift is what has kept a flat town on a shallow bay habitable. Projections put relative sea level 20–40 cm, or on higher scenarios 40–60 cm, above today's by 2100 — uplift overtaken within the century. A flood that happened once in living memory is not a fixed risk here; it is a rising one.
Source: Sea-level change and flood risks in the Estonian coastal zone (Springer), checked 1 August 2026 (today).
This page is a reading, not an alert service. The official sea-flood warning and any local action notice are here:
This is the sea height the Estonian Weather Service measures at the Pärnu coastal station. It is one gauge, not a street-by-street map of which lanes have water — the sea comes up unevenly, and wind and waves pile it higher against a shore than a calm number suggests.
It is not the official warning. When the sea is high, follow the official channel above and your local civil-protection instructions. This page never tells you a street is safe.
Data: Riigi Ilmateenistus / Keskkonnaagentuur (Estonian Environment Agency).