Interactive California Reservoir Ranges Dashboard
How a lot water is in California’s reservoirs?
If you’re studying this, it’s most likely the winter wet season in California once more, and time to verify on the standing of the water within the California reservoirs. I beforehand made a “bar graph” showing the overall level of water in the major California reservoirs. This dashboard supplies a bit extra element on the state of every of the reservoirs whereas additionally exhibiting an mixture whole. It updates hourly utilizing knowledge from the California Division of Water Sources (DWR) web site, giving an up-to-date image of California reservoir ranges.
It is a marimekko (or mekko) graph which can take a while to grasp if you happen to aren’t used to seeing them. Every “row” represents one reservoir, with bars exhibiting how a lot of the reservoir is crammed (blue) and unfilled (brown). The peak of the “row” signifies how a lot water the reservoir may maintain. Shasta is the reservoir with the biggest capability and so it’s the tallest row. The proportion of blue to brown will present how full it’s, whereas the pink line exhibits the historic stage that reservoir is usually at for this date of the water 12 months. The blue line signifies the reservoir’s water stage one 12 months in the past right this moment. There are lots of very small reservoirs (relative to Shasta) so the bars might be very skinny to the purpose the place they’re barely a sliver or could not even present up.
Directions:
If you’re on a pc, you’ll be able to hover your cursor over a reservoir and the dashboard on the high will present details about that particular person reservoir. If you’re on a cellular gadget you’ll be able to faucet the reservoir to get that very same information. It’s not potential to see or actually work together with the tiniest slivers. The primary aim of this visualization is to supply a fast overview of the standing of the principle reservoirs within the state and the way they evaluate to historic ranges.
You’ll be able to type the mekko graph by dimension – largest on the high to smallest on the backside – or by reservoir location, from north to south.
If you happen to click on on the “listing” button within the high proper of the dashboard, it’ll present an inventory of the reservoirs (so as of dimension from largest to smallest) and you may verify which of them you want to show. You too can share a customized URL by clicking the “Save URL” button which can put the customized URL into the URL bar of your browser which you’ll be able to then copy and share. You too can use it to observe solely the reservoirs you might be most involved in.
Models are in kaf, 1000’s of acre toes. 1 kaf is the quantity of water that might cowl 1 acre in a single thousand toes of water (or 1000 acres in water in 1 foot of water). It is usually the quantity of water in a dice that’s 352 toes per facet (in regards to the size of a soccer area). Shasta could be very giant and will maintain about 3.5 cubic kilometers of water at full (however not flood) capability.
Knowledge and Instruments
The info on water storage comes from the California Department of Water Resources’ (DWR) Data Exchange Center. Python is used to extract the information from this web page hourly and wrangle the information in to a clear format. Visualization was accomplished in javascript and particularly the D3.js visualization library. It was my first time utilizing D3 and it took me a very long time to stand up to hurry. It takes a good quantity of labor to make graphs in comparison with different extra plug-and-play libraries however its very customizable, which is a plus. It was the one instrument that I may discover that might permit me to make a vertical marimekko graph.
