Hydrologic forecasts are only as reliable as the data behind them. Validating inputs before every run protects public safety, safeguards credibility, and reduces the risk of errors. Through the Acquisition Tab and the Data Validation Editor, HEC-RTS provides multiple ways for water managers to quickly view and validate incoming data.
Acquiring Data
In the Acquisition tab you can retrieve and display time-series data from gages, such as river flows and stages, reservoir releases and elevations, precipitation, and temperature. You can define a time window that is relative to the current time by setting look back and look ahead times (in days or hours). Or, you can view historical data by specifying a starting and ending date and time. The figure below shows an example time window being defined relative to current time.
Monitoring and Validating Data
In the Acquisition tab, you can monitor and validate your incoming time series data. Refer to Monitoring and Validating Incoming Data for more detailed information.
Several tools are available to review the data.
Quality Color Bars
Quality color bars provide you with a quick overview of the acquisition processes by showing you the quality (missing values needing to be filled-in) and quantity (magnitude of data and possible data outliers) of your data.
Threshold Color Bars
You can use threshold color bars to compare current data against threshold values that you set for a location. The upper left threshold color bar in the figure below shows red for the parts of the time window when a gage downstream of the reservoir exceeds an operational flow threshold. The other three threshold color bars display the times when key downstream gages exceed the National Weather Service monitor stage (orange) or flood stage (red).
Thumbnail Plots
You can also use thumbnail plots to visualize your time-series data. Thumbnail plots act as mini-snapshots of your data over a chosen time window. In the example below, they display hydrographs for various gages across the watershed, making it easy to identify trends across the entire region in a single glance.
Data Status Summary
You can use the Data Status Summary to view groups of data (e.g., all precipitation data or all flow data) and check the status of the data streams to see if they are active.
Editing Data
When you are checking the validity of data to verify its accuracy, you might need to edit questionable data and fill in missing data. You can use the Data Validation Editor to edit time series data.
You can use text-entry editing or graphical editing to make data revisions. This tool is also convenient for estimating values using the graphical editor or the table of data values when there are data gaps (i.e., missing data). After editing the data, you can choose to accept the changes and store the revised data values back to the database or HEC-DSS file.
Visualizing Data
You can use plots or tables in HEC-RTS to visualize data. Refer to this page for more information.