river-flow

We are an international group of people from China, Germany, the Netherlands and of course New Zealand. We’ve all met at Movio where we found we share a common interest in big data and visualisation. There is so much cool data out there and translating that into meaningful stories is what we love to do.

The challenge we’ve chosen it to visualise changes in streamflow data through time on the United States river network.

Our problem was to find a way to translate this raw data into something the general public can understand. This is important because the data water stations provide is very broad and can be useful to all kinds of people.

For scientist it can give insights into trends over time. For example if you know when and where a dam was build you can find this date and see the effect it had on the water in the area.

For water sports enthusiasts it can help them find good conditions. For example huge velocity and speed with big boulders for rafting. A calm river with blue water and a nice temperature to go swimming. Or even perfect conditions to go trout fishing based on river width and fish population.

This can help people decide where to go on the weekends, kind of like a weather report for rivers.

We aggregate data from USGS to visualise streamflow on a United States map. Parameters like width, depth, velocity and speed are displayed in an intuitive way to make it accessible to a broad audience.

Upon this base layer we can map points of interest for specific activities. In this example we’re showing nice places to go swimming based on water temperature, water colour, speed and velocity.

Next steps are adding extra data layers and global coverage to provide more information to more people. Our project is open source and we hope scientists and fellow data techs will help us add more data from different sources. With more data we can define more use cases and be more specific.

Globalising would help bring the project to more people and potentially make it possible to investigate the redistribution of melted ice from polar caps.

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