Data Availability for Water Survey of Canada Stations

These graphs visualize the availability of water flow and level data for over 400 water survey stations within the Peace Athabasca Delta. This work was done to support the analysis of environmental flows within Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada.

I graphed these stations to be able to more easily select water stations for analyses. Rivers experience natural variation over time, both seasonally and even from year to year. The timing, volume, length of time, and variability of river flow is called a river’s hydrological regime.

In order to understand how a river or a watershed’s hydrological regime is changing over time, you often need multiple points of data along several watersheds, with daily flow measurements over many consecutive years.

Visualizing which stations have overlapping data in different watersheds will make it much easier for me and others on my team to pick water stations to analyze.

I graphed these stations by watershed and sorted from upstream to downstream. They are separated by data type: water level and flow.

Open-source hydrological data from the Water Survey of Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/water-overview/quantity/monitoring/survey.html

Open-sourced R packages used to tidy data and create tile plots: tidyverse, tidyhydat, zoo, lubridate, ggplot

Source code: https://github.com/Jacqui-123/EFlows-Project/blob/main/Station_summaries.Rmd

Plots of flow data availability for each watershed:

“07” refers to the main drainage basin (in this case, the Peace-Athabasca Delta), and then the letter after that represents a different watershed. There are 15 different watersheds here, one on each graph: “07A”, “07B”, “07C”, “07D”, “07E”, “07F”, “07G”, “07H”, “07J”, “07K”, “07L”, “07M”, “07N”, “07P”, “07Q”

Plots of water level data availability for each watershed:

There are 15 different watersheds here, one on each graph: “07A”, “07B”, “07C”, “07D”, “07E”, “07F”, “07G”, “07H”, “07J”, “07K”, “07L”, “07M”, “07N”, “07P”, “07Q”