Alberta River Basins
client success story
What we delivered
An interactive map showing updated Daily/Weekly/Monthly precipitation and flows, forecaster comments, ice observation reports, Water Supply Outlook, and archives.
- An easy-to-use interactive map available on desktop and mobile
- Dynamic content (updated hourly) from 5 sources presented in tables, graphs, maps and icons
- Includes a Forecaster Portal for community interaction (chat) for approved users in the community
- Automatic alerts to be sent to targeted recipients vial email or SMS
The organization
The organization
Managing provincial water resources
Alberta Environment – River Engineering and Technical Services is responsible for monitoring flood advisories and obtain up-to-date station information for Alberta's rivers and lakes.
The challenge
The challenge
How do you improve flood forecasting for the public?
In June 2013, southern Alberta was hit with one of the costliest floods in Canadian history. Alberta Environment and Park’s (AEP) river forecasting was criticized in the aftermath of this event. As a result of the floods, there was an outcry from the public to have access to current water levels, flows and flood forecasting information. The desire was to have this information available on multiple platforms and devices. AEP’s legacy site was not able to meet public demands.
The solution
The solution
A user-friendly dynamic web portal
Developed by Silver Creek, the Alberta River Basins website is a single-page GIS web application that provides flood advisory, river, lake precipitation and snow pillow information in Alberta, along with historical data to the public.
It also includes a portal for the forecasting team to interact with community and government agencies, allowing forecasters to post targeted data and information to impacted individuals. Forecasters can also chat and interact through the community portal using several real-time tools. The solution works on both mobile and desktop platforms with a modern responsive design.
- Collaborative Platform – A portal was developed for emergency or community managers to log into and have direct access to River Forecast Centre personal. Users can participate in flood event planning with a live GIS map which is “whiteboard / dashboard” enabled where they can communicate issues and upload geo-located photos or a diary of active events and chat with others in their basin community. While assessing river basin information, authenticated users can interact collaboratively in real-time with one another by utilizing Microsoft signal-R to publish drawing tools and live chat on shared maps to all logged in users based on their current role.
- Near Real-Time & Historical Data – Data relevant to specific river basins is current and up-to-date by the hour. This data is then used to generate near real-time tables and graphs that are accessible to both public and authenticated users. In addition to current up-to-date information, users have access to historical data and advisories for those same river basins.
- Accessible Spatial Data– The data is tagged with spatial location information which allows it to be mapped onto a Geographical Information System (GIS), i.e. ArcGIS for JavaScript by ESRI, allowing users to find or discover information relevant to a locale of interest. Users can also print detailed GIS reports on a specific area of interest and export to GeoTiff which entities like the Provincial Emergency Coordination Centre (PECC) use to overlay on their systems.
- Intuitive Graphical Interface – In additional to supplying users with tabular data, the web application provides graphical representation of data in weekly and yearly intervals. The solution was developed with a strong focus on performance optimized code for ability to withstand peak traffic during flood events
The benefits
The benefits
Always up-to-date reliable data source, available to everyone
The new Alberta River Basins web application https://rivers.alberta.ca/ is a tool that provides Albertans with the right information in a timely manner. By being well informed, Albertans will be able to make decisions more efficiently and take appropriate action when responding to changes in Alberta’s river basins.
The tool is well received by the public and was showcased on CTV live television in June 2016 (partial CTV clip archived and available upon inquiry). A demo of the application was also provided to the Sr. Account Executive of the Edmonton division of ESRI who praised the bundling of geospatial and Business intelligence reporting into a unique collaborative ecosystem which leverages the ESRI geospatial product suite in a way they haven’t seen before.
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