Help

Support · Braided

Braided is made by one person in Aotearoa. There's no help desk — there's an email address, and it's read.

The map

Why is this river grey?

Grey means no reading we can use — not that the river is fine. Otago's gauge data carries no reuse terms, and the Bay of Plenty's open export serves only quality-assured data, which its live series has none of. So the Clutha, Shotover, Manuherikia, Rangitāiki and Whakatāne are drawn but not measured: leaving them off would imply the country's rivers are only the ones we hold.

A gauge shows a level and a chart, but no colour and no rank. Why?

A few gauges sit far enough into tidal water that their record is mostly tide. Ranking one would rank the tide, so the app declines and says so.

What does the percentile mean?

Where today's reading sits in that gauge's own history: the 20th percentile means the river has been lower than this on 20% of days on record. It's per gauge — m³/s means something completely different on the Clutha and on a Canterbury creek.

Why doesn't the scale go up to flood?

Only about 7% of river gauges publish a flood threshold, and today every one of them is in Canterbury. A national red that could appear in just one region would be false everywhere else, so the scale ends at "High" and each card says whether its gauge has a threshold at all.

Why is a reading hours old?

Because that's when it was measured. The time under every number is the measurement time, never the time you opened the app, and a large gap fades the reading rather than letting it look current.

The number here doesn't match my council's website.

Usually timing — you're seeing a later reading than our last collection. Occasionally a council revises a value after quality control; we publish what they published. If it looks persistently wrong, email and say which gauge.

A swim spot says "no recent result". Is that bad?

It means nobody has published one, not that the water is bad. Councils sample through the bathing season and go quiet outside it; four regions run a predictive model instead. The card names which it's reading — a model refreshed an hour ago and a sample from last March are not the same claim.

A lake says "suitable for swimming" and also carries an algae warning. Which is it?

Both: they answer different questions. The swimming result counts faecal bacteria; toxic algae is cyanobacteria, a different organism on a different council programme and schedule, so a lake can be fine on one and dangerous on the other. That's why they're two rows with two dates, and why algae never changes the colour of the pin. If either says don't, don't.

The algae warning is months old. Is it still true?

Probably not, and the card says so. Councils sample roughly November to March, so out of season the newest result in the country can be months old — one site still carries an action-level warning from 2021. Past a fortnight the row switches to the past tense and carries its date.

Where does the air quality reading come from, and is "Good" official?

From LAWA, which carries every council's air monitoring shed — 47 report a live reading, across 14 of the 16 regions. It's a row on the card of any place within 25 km of a shed, and deliberately not a map layer: 47 pins is too few to read as national coverage.

The word is ours; the numbers aren't. LAWA publishes no air quality index and no named categories, and no official New Zealand scale could be verified, so "good", "moderate" and "poor" are measured against the WHO's 2021 24-hour guidelines (PM2.5 15, PM10 45 µg/m³) and New Zealand's legally binding NES-AQ standard (PM10 50). The yardstick is printed beside the verdict, and the verdict is always about the daily average — never the hourly reading, which is often several times higher.

Is the fire season on here the official one?

It's Fire and Emergency New Zealand's own status for that zone, in their words, with a link to their site. Whether you need a permit is their call — read it before you light anything.

Using the app

How do offline regions work?

Download a region before you leave coverage and its map, terrain, gauges, huts, campsites, forecasts and photos are stored on the phone. Readings are as fresh as the moment you downloaded them, and the app shows that age.

Do river alerts work when my phone is off, or out of coverage?

No. An alert fires when a reading we've received crosses your threshold, and delivery depends on the gauge reporting, our collection running, and Apple or Google reaching your phone. It can be late and it can never arrive. No alert has ever meant a river is safe to cross.

Does Braided track me?

No account, no advertising, no analytics in the app. Your location, saved places and downloaded regions never leave the phone. The only thing ever sent about you is a push token, and only if you create an alert. The privacy page is short.

Is it free? Will it stay free?

Free, and it has to stay that way — several sources are open to Braided precisely because it's non-commercial. No subscription, no paid tier, no advertising; the only money in the app is a voluntary koha that buys nothing.

The data

Where does it come from?

Regional councils (flow and level, rainfall, water temperature, turbidity), LAWA (more council gauges, and the bathing results behind the swim spots), DOC (huts, campsites, alerts), GeoNet (earthquakes, volcanoes, sea level), LINZ (topography, tides, place names), Fire and Emergency New Zealand, NOAA (sea surface temperature) and open global weather and marine models. Every source is recorded with its licence and credited in the app; anything without a clear open licence is not ingested.

Why isn't the MetService forecast in it?

MetService is commercial and its forecast isn't open, so Braided neither uses nor scrapes it. Forecasts come from an open global model, which is worse in the mountains than a New Zealand forecaster looking at New Zealand terrain. For the official forecast, go to MetService.

So why are MetService's warnings in it?

Because those they publish openly — the feed is licensed CC BY 4.0 in the payload itself. Warning and watch areas are drawn on the map, and any place inside one gets a band on its card. It's the one MetService product Braided reads, from their own feed and nowhere else.

How does the home page choose the places it shows?

By rule — and the rule only ever chooses the subject, never the reading. The river card takes the longest-recorded, largest flow gauge on one of the 108 main stems; the hut card the Great Walk hut with the most bunks; the beach card an open-coast swim spot with a sea temperature; the lake card a monitored lake with an algae result, worst first. Each then shows whatever that place happens to be doing. The pair of gauges below is found in the live file at load, and if no such pair exists today the section doesn't appear.

What happens if a council says no?

Its data comes out — adapter, map layer and card row. Several councils have been asked in writing and haven't replied; their data is in the app meanwhile, marked Awaiting licence reply in the Sources sheet, so you can see which readings rest on an open question.

How complete is it, really?

Exactly as complete as Aotearoa's open data, and not one gauge more — Braided takes no measurements of its own. Where a reading doesn't exist the card says so rather than filling the gap. And a gauge only ever measures one point on one river.

Can I have my region's council added?

Often it isn't technical — the data exists, collected with public money, and it's the permission that's missing. If you work at a council and can point at an open endpoint, that email would be very welcome.

Still stuck?

Email the address above. Bugs, wrong gauges, misnamed rivers and requests are all fair game.