Mr. Brian Hayes, TD, Minister of State with special responsibility for the Office of Public Works (OPW) today announced details of the new website www.waterlevel.ie created by his office, the Office of Public Works (OPW).
The OPW operates surface water monitoring stations at over 380 river, lake and tidal locations throughout Ireland. The OPW Hydrometric Section has developed a website, www.waterlevel.ie, which provides access to real time water level data at over 300 of these stations. The website supports OPW in its role as the lead agency for flood risk management in Ireland. It also provides vital support to Local Authorities in their management of, and response to, flood events nationwide.
Usage of the site has steadily increased with 8,760 visits recorded in March 2013. The highest daily usage recorded to date was 962 visits on 22nd March of this year. This peak can be attributed to heavy rain forecasts and a rainfall warning for the Dublin area issued by Met Éireann on the previous day and demonstrates the interest in accessing such data.
The Minister said, “In addition to the value of the data to support the operations of the OPW and Local Authorities, the data is also of interest to a range of other users, including members of the public and clubs involved in a wide variety of water-related recreational activities, such as fishing, boating, canoeing and kayaking.”
The Minister concluded, “ The www.waterlevel.ie website has been designed to be simple and easy to use. The layout of the site is consistent and has three layers – the home page, a station page for each of the more than 300 stations presently hosted on the site, and a page for the raw data from each sensor. I would encourage users to bookmark their favorite pages. The site has also been developed to allow the raw data to be easily downloaded by users and machines for reuse; water level data is typically updated every 15 minutes for each station.”
-Ends-
For further information please contact the OPW Press Office on 046 9426128
or pressoffice@opw.ie
Note to Editors:
It should be noted that the data that can be presented on the www.waterlevel.ie website is limited to a five week rolling window, due to the primary operational data transfer function of the website. The full archive of processed OPW hydrometric data (water level and river flow) may be accessed through the Hydro-Data website, www.opw.ie/hydro. The Hydro-Data website presents a range of data types including station meta-data, mapping, instantaneous data, sub-daily data series, summary statistics, and annual maxima series.
To date, in addition to the primate role of the website, the data has been incorporated into websites developed to inform fisheries and kayaking groups, and there is considerable potential for third party websites and application developers to access data in support of recreational and tourism interests. In addition, enquiries have been received as to the possibility of using this data in the provision of flood alert services by third parties.