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Scenario

Summary

• This project seeks to provide basic infrastructure to support a harmonized approach to monitoring rivers across NZ. There are many who would benefit from this including

  • Water quality
  • Flood monitoring
  • Recreation
  • Irrigation
  • Climate modeling
  • Environmental protection

• For the purposes of this prototype we have chosen to demonstrate the value provide to resilience to flooding

• About data reuse enabling simplified access to reduce cost and provide access to authoritative data.

• TAs hold primary responsibility for monitoring rivers and providing protection from flooding

• After a heavy rain increased flows may cause the riverbed to change shape

• Because of this, after the next heavy rain, water may go to new locations where it is not planned or managed. This is a bad thing. May pose new threats to people, property and the systems designed to protect these from flooding.

• Therefore we need to determine any changes to

  • Who is at risk from floods
  • How they are protected

• Who needs the most help is difficult to tell because

  • Measurements are not consistent across authorities
  • Naming conventions differ

Examining the morphological changes after flooding event to plan for future flooding events and analyse risks to critical/cultural (include Maori) protection assets

Problem

Numerous sensors for rivers across NZ

• Cannot easily merge data across regions, between regions or link to related data.

Standardised national common vocabulary, naming and indexing conventions are not implemented

• Creates uncertainty – Is this thing the same as that thing? How can I find the thing I am looking for?
• Unambiguously Connect sensors to the things they are sensing e.g. river sensor to river segment being monitored.
• Uncertainty if the descriptive terms from different providers match?

Benefits

Will allow a harmonized view of data from sensors

Standard indexing of hydro network feature and stations

Unambiguously link sensors to the things they are sensing

Fixing these problems will allow the creation of a basic infrastructure that will support a large number of end user and use cases:

• Water quality
• Flood monitoring
• Recreation
• Irrigation
• Climate modeling
• Environmental protection

Solutions

Major points

• One view of authoritative hydrometric sites in NZ river network
• registry of authoritative data providers
• harmonisation of data models
• EODP implementation
• Linking of observations to observed river segments
• Topological searches enabled across the observation/river network
• Language conversion English/Maori
• Exploring the best option of time series data display (cross-sections/long-sections)
• Empowering a federated architecture for any temporal/spatial environmental observation in a national context

Long Term impact

• To connect to spatial relevance/context - Reestablishment of authoritative
  • river naming index
  • site name index
• Documentation and recommendations on
  • best practice
  • lessons learnt
  • seed grant
  • governance
  • national implementation
  • conventions and policies supporting linked data
  • Uri naming
  • architecture
  • persistance
  • resource needs / long term funding
• NZ environmental observation catalogue for international partnership
• Feed into WMO Information System GBIF GEOSS

Story points

• Hutt Valley as focus area?

• How do floods modify the geomorphology of catchments?

• We are enabling harmonised discovery of hydrologic observations federated across various agencies through implementation of national registries / standards based mechanisms

• Looking into morphological changes after flooding event to plan for future flooding events and analyse risks to critical/cultural (include Maori) protection assets

• Information flow

• Choosing a river

• Looking at reaches

• Discovering what time series info is available

• accessing analysing x-sectional information/data

• Requires

  • harmonisation between time series of hydrological information and reach characteristics
  • geomorphology

• Bring together data from a selected set of councils and NIWA

• About data reuse enabling simplified access to reduce cost and provide access to authoritative data.