NWDTW 2024

The Measurement Priority Summary (MPS) tool was designed to give scientists and supervisors a data-driven approach to planning stream discharge measurements. The Pennsylvania and Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana (OKI) Water Science Centers have partnered to build an R Shiny application that is based on the OKI Excel workbook of the same name. Using the infrastructure of Posit Connect to host the application allows data updates to be automatically scheduled at any frequency and it ensures that all users are looking at the same data.

The primary focus of the MPS tool is to incorporate field trip information, rating curves, and current conditions including direction of sage into a table to determine which sites are the most critical to visit at any given time. Sites that have not been visited at the current stage of the stream in at least 5 years are marked as priority gages. This table also includes gage height forecasts from the National Weather Service (NWS) for selected sites and shows how much a higher a stage is predicted to be over the following three days. On a separate tab, a secondary table shows only the sites that are listed as being in priority for measurement. In these tables, many of the fields are sort and search enabled, allowing a user to quickly find information about field trips, most recent measurements, and gage forecasts. MPS is connected to SIMS so it is updated as field trip assignments change.

MPS also includes tabs with an interactive map and an individual site report to provide additional graphical data. The map shows current priority status as well as current and predicted flood levels from NWS for each site. Map overlays include polygon shapefiles of predicted flooding and excessive rainfall forecasts for the following three days. Links from map popups are available for the NWIS and National Water Prediction Service (NWPS) site pages. The individual site report generates a table, bar plot, and line plot for the previous 365 days based on the selected site.