Alberta/Nature/Climate & Environment
Alberta's Rivers, Compared to Normal
Nineteen months of streamflow at 366 gauges, drawn onto every river in the province.
River gauges are usually shown as a single hydrograph for a single station. I wanted the whole province at once, every river and every day, so you could watch a dry spring, a storm, and a slow recession move through the system.
What it shows
Each frame is one day. Rivers glow blue when they’re running above normal for that day of the year and turn brown when they’re below. Main stems get wider and narrower with their flow. The story of the period is a dry stretch followed by the late-June 2026 storm, which dropped more than 100 mm on Edmonton in three days. You can watch the pulse move down the North Saskatchewan. At the peak, almost two-thirds of the province’s river segments are glowing above normal.
How I made it
There are 366 gauges in all: Alberta’s own real-time network plus the federal Water Survey stations, including a few just across the borders in the NWT, Saskatchewan and BC. I built “normal” from HYDAT’s long daily record, computed each day’s flow as a share of normal on a log scale, and spread every gauge’s reading onto nearby river segments. The weights favour the same river first, then the same sub-basin, then distance. Segments far from any gauge fade to a dim olive, so they don’t claim more certainty than they have.
Caveats
A single gauge stands in for many kilometres of river, and regulated reaches below dams don’t behave like natural flow. I dropped canal, drain and dam gauges for that reason. The provincial real-time feed only keeps about two years, so this window is as long as the open data allows.