Development and Implementation of Database and Analyses for High Frequency Data

For environmental data measured by a variety of sensors and compiled from various sources, practitioners need tools that facilitate data access and data analysis. Data are often organized in formats that are incompatible with each other and that prevent full data integration. Furthermore, analyses of these data are hampered by the inadequate mechanisms for storage and organization. Ideally, data should be centrally housed and organized in an intuitive structure with established patterns for analyses. However, in reality, the data are often scattered in multiple files without uniform structure that must be transferred between users and called individually and manually for each analysis. This effort describes a process for compiling environmental data into a single, central database that can be accessed for analyses. We use the Logan River watershed and observed water level, discharge, specific conductance, and temperature as a test case. Of interest is analysis of flow partitioning. We formatted data files and organized them into a hierarchy, and we developed scripts that import the data to a database with structure designed for hydrologic time series data. Scripts access the populated database to determine baseflow separation, flow balance, and mass balance and visualize the results. The analyses were compiled into a package of scripts in Python, which can be modified and run by scientists and researchers to determine gains and losses in reaches of interest. To facilitate reproducibility, the database and associated scripts were shared to HydroShare as Jupyter Notebooks so that any user can access the data and perform the analyses, which facilitates standardization of these operations.