David Watson River Forecast Section Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development

River Forecast Team Mandate –Real-time flow forecasting and support to partners (public, provincial staff, Municipal Emergency Managers, Industry, Provincial Parks, National Parks, Prairie Provinces) –Near real-time data quality management; enter WSC and Provincial field measurement; assist in prioritized field maintenance of monitoring network –Daily Natural Flow Forecasting –Water Supply To provide Albertans with information related to current and future river or river ice conditions to enable Albertans to make decisions related to water supply, and emergency response planning.

Previous Public Access to Data Access to “Near-Real-Time” Data Alberta River Basins Website. How Current is the Data? Alberta River Basins Website. Data Transmission, Processing, Database Ingestion, Data made available to web server. Not uncommon for data displayed on the web to be ~ 2-3 hours old.

Alberta Basins Webpage – Oldman Basin

Previous Public Access to Advisories Access to Advisories (Pre-2013) Current and Historical In 2013, the River Forecast Section adopted the Alberta Emergency Alberta warning system, which allowed users to sign up for RSS feeds, and eventually text message alerts. This system would alert users of ALL advisories throughout the province, did not allow for users to select the type of advisory they were interested in. Access to Forecasters Comments

Previous Advisory – PDF Format

Previous Forecaster Comments - PDF

June 2013 – Shift in Public Expectation Banff Falls Bow River 2013 Canmore –Cougar Creek 2013 and 2014 Exshaw – Bow River Carrot Creek Banff Park 2013

Alberta Rivers App App Description: Obtain the latest information about Alberta’s rivers, including flood advisories and comments issued by Alberta’s River Forecast Centre. View all current surface water data for Alberta. Public Need Served Access to Near-Real-Time Data Data displayed is in higher resolution 15 min intervals, vs. hourly aggregation. Data is truly Near-Real-Time Data displayed on the app is only 20 minutes older than what is available to Forecasters in the WISKI database.

Alberta Rivers App Features: View all monitoring stations on a map –398 Rivers/Lake stations –315 Precipitation stations –17 Snow Pillow stations Tap stations to view current data and whether flows are normal Receive notifications when new advisories and relative comments are issued Save your own list of important stations for quick reference

Advisories apply to streams and their tributaries unless otherwise noted. No significant precipitation is expected in the next week – although conditions will remain unsettled Water levels rises of up to 0.7 m were observed over the weekend The maximum precipitation occurred in the James and Clearwater River Basins (50mm )

Questions? Suggestions?