American Whitewater Ushers In New Stream Gage Service
American Whitewater is pleased to announce that we’ve replaced our popular stream gage service with a new service that will improve performance for river enthusiasts. American Whitewater’s National Whitewater Inventory (NWI) is the definitive online guide to whitewater rivers in the United States, and dates back to the 1990s. Along with crowdsourced descriptions and images of over 6,000 whitewater runs, the NWI associates most runs with an online flow gage and depicts whether the runs are low, medium, or high for boating, through color-coded flow ranges. The new gage service is more reliable, affordable, clearly displayed, and easier to maintain and innovate on.
NWI visitors may notice a few changes to the way the gage service looks and works. Each flow graph has much greater resolution, and quick links to the source gage from which the NWI is pulling the data. Flow ranges are more clearly defined and displayed. Editing gages and flow ranges has been streamlined to produce greater consistency across rivers and to be significantly easier. Once edited, every river will depict low, medium, and high runnable ranges, as well as too low and too high ranges. Many gages that were not working under the old system are now working and we’ve added new gages from the Oregon Department of Water Resources, US Bureau of Reclamation, and Placer County Water Agencies. Certain dreamflows and Colorado Division of Water Resources gages only have current flows, and Quebec gages are not yet compatible with our new system. The site’s few paddler-calculated gages will work but will not be editable for a while longer. Overall, visitors can expect faster, more reliable gage updates, and additional improvements over time.
A team of American Whitewater programmers has been steadily working on this project for approximately a year. Big shout out to super volunteer programmers Owen Coutts, Jesse Rosenzweig, and Jack Rasiel, AW programmer Nick Gottlieb, and Ryan Groth who was one of the architects of the original gage service. Updating the gage service was a priority for our organization for the recreational value and also the safety value that gages and flow recommendations provide to the public.
Chip In: This project was funded by American Whitewater membership and donations, and through the generosity of volunteers. We continue to work on other facets of the NWI, and donations are needed to support this work.
Volunteer: Experienced programmers interested in volunteering for American Whitewater should contact kevin@americanwhitewater.org.
Share Beta: The easiest way to help the NWI flourish is to add trip reports to any river page, including text and photos. We love and need new photos! Just log in and click “+ Trip Report” on a river page. If you are just a bit tech savvy and know your rivers really well, please consider adding gages on rivers lacking gages on our site, or adding or editing flow recommendations on rivers with limited or out of date information. You’ll need to log into the American Whitewater website, click the edit pencil above the beta box on any river page, and click on the flow tab to get started. Hit up the AW streamteam google group with questions.
Enjoy the new gage services on our website!