Floods are on the rise globally with the frequent record-breaking events occurring during the past few years in the US alone. These extreme events pose a considerable threat to human life and result in destructive damage to property, communities, and the built environment (e.g., Phillips et al., 2018). The south and the southeast US have experienced frequent storms with annually, on average, more than 85 named and unnamed thunderstorms (NWS, 2020). These events happened in quick succession (∼2 weeks apart) and produced catastrophic flooding in wide geographic areas (∼1,000 km swath) and within short timespans (less than a 48-hr period; Donratanapat et al., 2020). Successive flood events can even lead to higher costs in terms of repairing and rebuilding destroyed buildings and critical infrastructures (CIs) due to a lack of early warning systems (e.g., Donratanapat et al., 2020;Field et al., 2012;Hinkel et al., 2014). This necessitates the importance of detecting flood magnitudes ahead of the event to protect communities and CIs. The flood stage is the height of the water surface in a stream gaging station, not the height throughout the stream. A vast amount of research has been conducted to develop different tools and test their reliability in predicting near real-time flood stage estimation (Krzysztofowicz et al., 1994).