Data Watch
A live public dashboard for your reservoir.
Twelve Data Watches are already running — for two of the largest reservoirs in North America, for the Great Salt Lake, for the lowest lake on Earth. Each one takes the data your agency already publishes and turns it into a page the public, the press and your own board can read without calling you to ask what the number means.
If you manage water and your current public page is a spreadsheet, a PDF or a static table nobody has touched since 2003, this is what the alternative looks like.
What you get
Every Watch is the same engine with your water's configuration, so a feature built for one arrives on all of them — and your page keeps improving after it ships.
The live number, with its provenance
Level or storage from the agency that publishes it, updated daily, every reading dated and attributed to its source — with the gage, the datum and the length of the record stated on the page.
The record, charted
Windows from 90 days to the complete record, reference lines that give a number meaning (full pool, shortage tiers, the record low), and a year-against-year view that answers “is this bad, or is this normal?”
An assistant grounded in your data
Readers can ask questions in plain language. It answers only from the numbers on the page and the curated notes behind it — it does not speculate, and it says when it does not know.
Email notices, double opt-in
A weekly plain-language summary and a notice when the water crosses a milestone. No accounts, no tracking pixels, one-click unsubscribe that deletes the record.
Built to be found
Its own subdomain or yours, section pages for history, map, weather, access and questions, structured data for search engines, and share previews that carry the current reading.
The water in context
An interactive basin map with the gages that measure it, the rivers that feed it, boat-ramp and access status where an authority publishes it, weather on the water, and a credited photo gallery.
See one running
These are live, not mockups. Every number on them came from a public agency feed this morning.
What we need from you
- The waterbody, and whichever agency publishes its data — we will tell you honestly if nobody does.
- A name and, if you want your own branding, a logo and a colour.
- Any local knowledge worth writing down: operating rules, thresholds that matter, the questions you are asked most.
- Optionally a domain. Otherwise it lives on a hydromap.com subdomain.
Not an IT project on your side. No server to provision, no integration for your staff to maintain, no software to install.
What shapes the cost
Every waterbody is different, and what already exists upstream decides most of the work. Tell us the reservoir and we will scope it — setup plus a monthly fee to keep it live, monitored and improving.
- Your water already has a public feed
- A USGS gage, a Reclamation series, a state telemetry record. This is the fastest case — the twelfth Watch went from a scouting document to live in one working session, with a 69-year daily record behind it.
- No public feed exists
- Then the work is finding one or building an adapter to whatever your operator does publish, which is the case for several of the Watches already running.
- Bathymetry, custom layers, or your own domain
- Depth surveys, shoreline modelling at a given elevation, area-capacity curves and bespoke map layers are scoped case by case.
What a Data Watch will not say
This matters more than any feature on the list above, because a public page carrying your name is only useful for as long as it is trusted. The rule across the whole network is that a page never states more than its sources support.
- We do not state a vertical datum no source publishes — one live Watch says exactly that, because its operator has never published one.
- We do not draw a lake bottom from bathymetry we do not have.
- We do not print a forecast we cannot attribute to the agency that issued it.
- We do not let a stale feed masquerade as a current reading: an old number is shown with its own date, or not at all.
Tell us the reservoir.
Send the waterbody and whoever publishes its data. We will tell you what is possible with what exists today, what it would take, and what it would cost — and we will say so plainly if the data is not there yet.