Streamflow and hydrometric monitoring
Stage, discharge and flood response — whether you look after one creek or run a full hydrometric network.
Where most hydrometric programmes start
Level is measured continuously; discharge is not. The rating curve that connects them is developed offline, applied to the level record afterwards, and revisited when someone notices it has drifted. Between site visits, channel change is invisible — a shifted bed or a blocked trash rack shows up as a number that looks plausible and is wrong.
Rating curves applied to live level
Curve fitting quantifies the relationship between two parameters, and a calculated channel applies it to live level data so discharge is a maintained channel rather than a periodic calculation. When the rating is revised, the derived channel follows.
Because the imagery sits beside the measurements, a reading that looks wrong can be checked against what the site looked like at the time.
- Stage–discharge rating applied to live level data
- Current conditions across the network on one map
- Alarm notification when sites reach critical elevations
- Field camera imagery for bed movement, trash rack buildup and flood stage
- Metadata storage for verification measurements and field observations
Around the gauging network
Public data feeds
Publish live conditions to your own website through the infinitii flowworks API — useful where river levels are of public interest, and cheaper than maintaining a second system to do it.
Rainfall alongside flow
Return frequency analysis on the rainfall that produced the event, in the same place as the hydrograph it produced.
Flexible data transfer
Link directly to live data, or upload historical files — a day, a year or a decade — through the high-speed transfer service.
Your gauges and everyone else’s
A hydrometric programme rarely sits on its own instrumentation alone. Public agency data can be configured as ordinary sites and channels in infinitii flowworks — the USGS, Environment Canada, NOAA, NASA and similar services — so an upstream public gauge sits beside your own record rather than in a separate browser tab.
Once configured they behave like any other channel: graph them together, alarm on them, and use them as inputs to calculations and models.
- USGS, Environment Canada, NOAA, NASA and similar services as configured sites and channels
- Public gauges upstream or downstream of your own, on the same chart
- Usable as inputs to calculated channels and model runs
- Pulled automatically over web API — no manual download step
Predicting discharge, continuously
Streamflow is where model integration started for us. The first deployment ran RAVEN — a hydrological modelling framework — to predict discharge on Anderson Creek, driven by rainfall, temperature and soil moisture drawn from NASA, Environment Canada and physical sensors on the ground. The work was carried out under the Fresh Water Data Commons project, part of Canada’s Digital Supercluster, alongside partners including Microsoft, Teck Resources and the University of Victoria.
The point is that it does not stop. Rather than a model built during a study and validated once, the simulation runs continuously against live incoming data, and its results come back as channels you can graph, alarm and report on like any measurement.
That also covers the derived quantities a hydrological model needs. Snow melt and soil moisture can be calculated in FACE Pro from contributing sources, and third-party weather model data brings the forecast in — so the same machinery that reproduces yesterday can project tomorrow.
- RAVEN hydrological simulation running continuously against live data
- Driven by rainfall, temperature and soil moisture from public and physical sources
- Snow melt and soil moisture derived as calculated channels
- Third-party weather model data as a forecast input
- Model results returned as channels, alongside the measurements
On stage–discharge rating: curve fitting quantifies the relationship and a calculated channel applies it to live level, so discharge is maintained rather than periodically recomputed — and when the rating is revised the derived channel follows. The packaged version of this was originally built for a particular customer, which is how a good deal of infinitii flowworks gets built. If the rating behaviour you need is not quite the one described here, it is worth asking.
Lead time, on a screen built for the people using it
Flood forecasting runs as an application inside infinitii flowworks, with the results delivered through a custom dashboard built around how the responding team actually works — rather than as a model output somebody has to interpret. The same builder covers the quieter days too: a programme dashboard showing which gauges are reporting, which have gone quiet and how the network is behaving overall.
That distinction matters during an event. The people who need the forecast are rarely the people who built it, and a prediction nobody can read in time is not lead time.
- Forecast river response, not just recorded stage
- Results delivered through a dashboard designed for the responding team
- Built on the same live data, public sources and model runs described above
- Deployed per utility rather than as a standard subscription feature — ask whether it fits your system
Who this helps, and how
Running the gauging programme
See which sites are reporting and which have gone quiet, without opening each one.
Rating and data quality
Revise a rating and have every downstream discharge value follow, with the original record preserved and the change recorded.
Share with the public
River conditions are often of public interest, and the API publishes them to your own website — so the page the public reads is fed by the same record the programme is run from.
Flood response
Alarms on elevation, delivered to whoever is on duty, with the recent trend attached rather than just a threshold breach.
Questions this answers
- What is the current stage and discharge at every site in the network?
- How does this event compare with the largest on record at this site?
- Has the channel shifted since the last rating — and what did the site look like then?
- Which sites have stopped reporting, and when did they stop?
Try it on your own gauges
Bring a site with a rating you are not confident in. That tends to be the most useful place to start.