Irish water level alerts

Irish Kayaking and Canoeing discussion forum.

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playak
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Irish water level alerts

Post by playak » Sun Jul 15, 2012 12:45 pm

I just wanted to let you know that I added Ireland to the Playak Flows service:

http://playak.com/flows.php?country=Ireland

As a logged in user, you can set a level at which we will alert you whenever your local river reaches that level.

The source data is from http://hydronet.epa.ie/ . If you know of more or better sources, let me know and I'll see if I can add those as well. Oh, and any other feedback is welcome as well of course.

Cheers,
Jeroen

dave g
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by dave g » Mon Jul 16, 2012 7:05 am

Hi Jeroen
Appreciate the work thats gone into this. Thanks
Unfortunately Irish rivers are generally spate rivers and by the time data makes it onto the EPA website the water has long gone. When I looked today my local river had a reading taken in january and the most recent i could find on any river was 2 days old. Water doesnt last that long here. Sadly

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Seanie
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by Seanie » Mon Jul 16, 2012 7:35 am

Again, apologies for not getting the finger out. I've been working on a new version of the gauges for some time (the backed is working, I simply need to get the graphs working). Jeroen I'll send you a link to the JSON feed (two weeks from now) so you can get the email alerts up and running for those.

playak
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by playak » Mon Jul 16, 2012 8:24 am

Seanie wrote:Again, apologies for not getting the finger out. I've been working on a new version of the gauges for some time (the backed is working, I simply need to get the graphs working). Jeroen I'll send you a link to the JSON feed (two weeks from now) so you can get the email alerts up and running for those.
json would be great, thanks. it's funny how every hydro agency publishes things in their own format, which means parsing it all is a lot of work. closest thing to a standard seems to be WaterML by the USGS, but even that format is pretty flakey. and of course, they carefully write the river name and state for each entry, but forgot to have a field for 'country'. typical :)

I also created a simple XML format myself, which I called Swift (Standard Waterlevel Info Format). Really simple and looks a lot like RSS. This helps me a lot massaging it all into a common format. If anybody is interested in the format, let me know and I'll mail you an example.

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Seanie
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by Seanie » Mon Jul 16, 2012 1:31 pm

Ha, it looks like we did the same research. Feel free to post your spec here, I'm sure no one will mind if its get a bit ultra nerdy. :D

Does your schema allow the embedding of the lat, long and altitude data? (oh, and lat, long reverse geocodemight be an easy way to get the country info that's missing from WaterML)

Schemas can be helpful, but the minute they get in the way you should chuck them out and go with JSON or plain XML, they aren't worth the extra effort. When dealing with large amounts of data I find that the verbosity/complexity of a schema can often blind you of the fact the underlying data is inaccurate. Treating each outputted graph as being a relative statement about that specific sensor (gauge) is fine, but for anything more direct knowledge of the sensor (gauge) and its calibration quirks are key. (my domain knowledge in this respect comes from non-water/kayaking related data analysis)

playak
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by playak » Mon Jul 16, 2012 4:37 pm

dave g wrote:Hi Jeroen
Appreciate the work thats gone into this. Thanks
Unfortunately Irish rivers are generally spate rivers and by the time data makes it onto the EPA website the water has long gone. When I looked today my local river had a reading taken in january and the most recent i could find on any river was 2 days old. Water doesnt last that long here. Sadly
Thanks Dave. I'm aware that there's a lag in the Irish gauges, but I'll use whatever data I can get. In some other countries like the US, Switzerland and France, it works pretty well is is updated several times per day. If you know of any additional or better sources for Ireland, please let me know and I'll see if I can add those as well. Cheers, Jeroen.

aqualung
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by aqualung » Tue Jul 17, 2012 9:20 am

Hi, this is somewhat informal but on Fb we (friends) have a "irish river levels" and "paddlebuddies" section used to share any current info :? not much but well!!!
Seanie, if you contact the Ci(icu) I hear they are prepared to look at investing in river gauges

B

playak
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by playak » Tue Jul 17, 2012 10:21 am

We could theoretically also create a form on Playak where people can manually enter water levels, and then those will be treated like the others, with nice graphs etc, and everybody can also subscribe to e-mail alerts. The human factor would make this service a bit unreliable of course. Or would you guys think there will always be people who care enough to do this regularly?

playak
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by playak » Sat Jul 21, 2012 12:37 pm

playak wrote:We could theoretically also create a form on Playak where people can manually enter water levels, and then those will be treated like the others, with nice graphs etc, and everybody can also subscribe to e-mail alerts. The human factor would make this service a bit unreliable of course. Or would you guys think there will always be people who care enough to do this regularly?
Oh wait, I just found out that you guys already made your own gauge system, so that's even a lot better. I wasn't aware of that when I entered my first post. Not sure how you did that, but it sounds like a pretty large undertaking. Am I correct that you were talking about a JSON interface to that data? That would be fantastic. Of course I would credit you and link back to you on the Playak pages that use that data.

Cheers,
Jeroen

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Seanie
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by Seanie » Mon Aug 27, 2012 6:04 pm

Thanks to help from Daithi, I've made some small progress towards getting the gauges pages upgraded.

http://gauges.iww.ie/

Each SMS shows up as different colour(this may change) . I've a ton more to do. But I think we've broken the back of the problem (mainly to do with receiving and processing the data sent by the gauges).

For more information about the gauges project, please check out the IWW Wiki:
http://wiki.iww.ie/index.php/River_Gauges

Note: the JSON data format or URI's may not be finalized. I'll try to nail them down next week.

playak
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by playak » Mon Sep 10, 2012 10:17 am

Hi guys, thanks for that great work. I now added those gauges (at least the active ones) to the Playak Flows service, so people can now also use the level alerts, and by clicking the heart symbols, add a gauge graph to their personalized vied of the Playak front page.

Each gauge page links back to you of course.

Cheers,
Jeroen

Lorcan K
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Re: Irish water level alerts

Post by Lorcan K » Mon Sep 10, 2012 10:46 pm

Hughely impressed with all the work on gauges and gauge technology, alerts etc.
Many thanks to the developers and sponsors.

Some thoughts

http://www.nratraffic.ie/

http://waterlevel.ie/realtime/list/

The NRA measure rainfall through a growing set of weather stations.
The OPW measure waterflows through an improving set of gauges and web sites.
The ESB control water flows and levels through a large catchment area.
METEIREANN have rainfall radar and forecast technology.

They are all public bodies - at the moment.

Could the ICU promote an integration of the various rainfall / flow data sets to forecast river levels?


Lorcan K


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