The Confluence

A confluence is where two streams meet and combine flow. It is also where separate records of a watershed can join into a single picture.

The Confluence is where DANalytics publishes public watershed reports.

Every Project FLOW classroom and every CEDAR deployment produces a record of a place — continuous sensor data, field measurements, and the public streamflow, snowpack, and climate context that surrounds them. Those records are normally seen only by the people who collect them, in software the public will never open.

Each Confluence report is one page for one site: what the water is doing now, how it has changed across the water year, and what the measurements do and do not tell us. Reports are generated directly from the deployment that produces the data, so they stay current without anyone maintaining a website by hand.

They are meant to be read by a parent, a neighbor, a city council member, or someone who stopped on a bridge and wondered.

First on the Carson

The first report will come from Eagle Valley Middle School, the founding Project FLOW chapter, where students monitor the Carson River — field measurements one to two times per month, continuous water temperature, and streamflow from the USGS gage downstream.

What appears here is always the chapter’s decision. A chapter’s data becomes public only where the chapter deliberately publishes it.

Read about Project FLOW →

What comes next

As more sites come online, the reports become comparable: the same measurements, the same methods, different reaches of the same watershed. That is the point at which The Confluence begins to describe a river rather than a monitoring station.

We will publish that when there is something real to publish.