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, Visualization 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 time series data. Several tools are available to show the quality and quantity of the data. Quality color bars and thumbnail plots 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.
If the quality color bar or thumbnail plot for a location indicates that the data are questionable, you can check the data using plots and tables.
Similar to the quality color bars, you can use threshold color bars in the Acquisition module to compare current data against threshold values that you set for a location. You can also use thumbnail plots to help understand your watershed’s hydrometeorological or operational conditions.
The upper left threshold color bar in the above figure 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). You can also use thumbnail plots and tables to visualize your time-series data. The example figure above uses thumbnail plots to display hydrographs at gages upstream and downstream of the reservoir, and on a lateral branch of the river.
You can use the Data Status Summary to view groups of data (e.g., all precipitation data or all flow data). You can also 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.