Flow, Baby, Flow!

We hope to make an engaging web application which visualizes USGS data on stream flow rates.

You can see our work at our website.

We will be pulling in data about daily flow rates for US states from USGS NWIS web services. Once we have extracted the daily flow rate per reporting area, we need to combine the information to arrive at a statewide flow rate. These numbers are quite spiky (because not all locations report on all days, and each state has a different density of water monitoring) so the raw data is not terribly useful.

So the next step for us is normalizing this data so that we achieve a baseline for each state. Then we can show these normalized values in a color-coded choropleth.

Finally, we wanted our users to be able to explore through the dataset's time dimension. In order to achieve this, we have added animation from one time period to the next, and have allowed users to select years in the dataset by picking from a dropdown list.

The map is built using openstreetmap, Leaflet (a javascript library for displaying data on maps), and custom javascript.

We hope you enjoy exploring the historical water data as much as we enjoyed making this website!

Sam, Andrew, and Joe

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