Stream flow and water temperature for BC's Freshwater Atlas
wet estimates how much water flows in almost every stream in British Columbia, as a long-term average for each month from models, and publishes it openly. It also tracks flow and water temperature at hydrometric stations in the seasons that matter to fish, filling gaps in temperature records from air temperature. Habitat models use the flow to rate where fish can spawn and rear, and the station records show how this year compares with normal when planning or monitoring restoration.
Where each larger river's default flow comes from. Most take it from the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium's routed model (blue); wet's own water balance (orange) fills in where that model does not reach or reads far too low.
pak::pak("NewGraphEnvironment/wet")wet is under active development and its functions change between releases (see NEWS). Pin a release for reproducible work: pak::pak("NewGraphEnvironment/wet@vX.Y.Z").
Reading the published flow needs only duckdb. Station water temperature also needs tidyhydat, station flow a HYDAT database (tidyhydat::download_hydat()), and building the flow the Freshwater Atlas in PostgreSQL through fwapg.
Monthly flow (m³/s) on the Bulkley River at Quick from both sources; month 0 is the year:
library(wet)
q <- wet_segment_monthly(NULL, 17057325, groups = "BULK")
xtabs(round(q_m3s) ~ source + month, q)
#> month
#> source 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
#> pcic_routed 118 32 23 19 48 223 294 248 185 120 97 74 48
#> wet_balance 118 45 50 48 86 220 303 203 109 106 98 87 62- Stream Discharge per Segment: what the published flow is, which source to use, how to read it, and how well each source matches the gauges.
- Monthly Flow per Segment: the twelve months, as hydrographs at three Bulkley gauges and scored at gauges across the province.
- Chinook Flow at Two Stations: how recent flow in three Chinook salmon windows at two stations in the Bulkley compares with its 1981–2010 normal.
- Water temperature functions: daily station temperature, gap filling and growing-season degree days.
- Function reference
| Package | Role |
|---|---|
| wet | Stream flow and water temperature for BC's Freshwater Atlas (this package) |
| fresh | Stream network modelling engine: segment, classify, cluster, aggregate |
| link | Intrinsic habitat models: develop, test and communicate |
| cd | Climate departure: baselines, anomalies and trends, and ERA5-Land climate |
| gq | Shared map symbology |
link's habitat models can read wet's published discharge, and cd computes the departures from wet's yearly station values.
Routed flow is PCIC's VIC-GL model routed with Raven (hydromosaic), placed on the Freshwater Atlas by New Graph's fork of fwapg. The water balance follows Chapman et al. (2018), fitted to Water Survey of Canada gauges in HYDAT. Station data come from HYDAT, ECCC's real-time feed and its provisional records as archived by water-temp-bc, and the stream network from the BC Freshwater Atlas through fwapg.
citation("wet")MIT (see LICENSE).