Category: Data Management

FlowWorks Graphic Editing QA/QC Tools

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FlowWorks graphic data editing and QA/QC tools make it possible to edit any and all data, on a single secure web platform, from anywhere. Designed by power users from the FlowWorks community, the editing tools combine the game-changing FACE (FlowWorks Advanced Calculation Engine) with an intuitive interface designed to make short work of data editing. Using the tools, analysts and data managers can select data directly on graphs and tables to delete or modify it including applying offsets, interpolation and much more. A complete history of all edits is stored in the permanent record so reviewing data across multiple hardware platforms has never been easier.

The new FlowWorks Graphic Editing QA/QC tools make it easy to:

  • Quickly select data channels to edit
  • Select data points directly by drawing boxes on time-series graphs or scatter-graphs, using date range selection tools, or through direct entry of dates and times
  • Raw data is always protected from editing – editing tools make it easy to save edited data to new records
  • Find and replace missing data
  • Apply corrections to ranges of data, or to individual data points
  • Make quick work of simple operations such as nulling invalid data, applying constants and linearly varying ramps, and data substitution.
  • Automatically create and edit QA/QC flags
  • View and make direct edits in the tabular data display
  • Add notes to document your edits, which can be displayed on the graphical interface

One-stop data editing – all part of the power of FlowWorks.

FACE: FlowWorks Advanced Calculation Engine

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The one-stop data management platform has arrived. A major new upgrade to the FlowWorks data platform places the power of the FlowWorks Advanced Calculation Engine (FACE) directly into user’s hands.

FACE gives FlowWorks a set of real-time data manipulation tools allowing users to create and define new data channels out of incoming channels using advanced math, statistics and logic equations. Now users can create, edit, delete and combine data channels with powerful mathematical functions for sophisticated real-time analysis. All part of the power of FlowWorks.

Included in FACE:

  • All the standard mathematical functions needed to combine and manipulate values across all sites and channels
  • Tools to define lookup tables for weirs, flumes, pipe cross-sectional areas and other physical constraints and map them to data channels
  • Conditional logic statements (IF…THEN…ELSE) to branch your calculations to other levels of complexity as needed
  • Tools to create rolling averages and sums, and set up sophisticated alarm rules based on those values to monitor specific events across multiple stations
  • Functions to create true time-weighted averages of irregularly spaced data
  • Tools to turn irregularly spaced time-series data into clean, continuous datasets of 5-minute, hourly, daily, or any other calculated interval
  • Advanced rainfall conversion functions to turn ANY rainfall data type (cumulative, event-based, time-interval) directly into 5-minute, hourly, daily, or other rainfall interval desired.
  • Tools to move data forward or backward in time to compare it with previously collected datasets
  • The ability to define constants, apply linearly varying offsets, and much more

FACE: Think of it as an Excel-quality calculation tool for real-time data analysis.

New Features Added to Map View and Graphing Tool!

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The programmers have been really busy the last couple of weeks, and we have some very cool new features to share with you!

Quicklinks to Graphing Templates

Let’s say you are navigating around on the map view page, and you click on site.  Now when the context box opens, if there are saved graphing templates that go with that site you can now select them directly from a new dropdown box!  This allows you to quickly navigate to a pre-saved graph using the map view.


Global Graphing Templates
So you have just made a nice new graphing template, and you want to share it with other users that are allowed to see the site(s) that the template shows.  Now, when you save the graph template there is a checkbox that let’s you do that!


If you check the “Share this graph with other authorized users?” box, anyone else that can see this site will also have access to the graph template you’ve created.

New FlowWorks Tool – Rainfall Mass Balance

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FlowWorks is pleased to announce the arrival of our newest rainfall analysis tool.  This one is aimed at easing the task of performing quality control checks when you have multiple rain gauges.  It can be used to validate rainfall from both historical and current events, and like all FlowWorks tools it’s quick and easy to use.  Check it out…

Tipping bucket rainfall gauges are prone to various sources of failure, including plugged funnels, seized bearings, sudden changes in instrument level, and even well-meaning staff who perform maintenance inspections without reporting when these were done.  The result sometimes sticks out like a sore thumb, say months of missing data or sudden, inexplicably high “events”.  But often, these problems are not clearly visible and can be missed.  This is where our Rainfall Mass Balance (RMB) tool comes in.

Say you have two rain gauges in your network.  If you want to check how one of them is doing, a good way to do this is to check it against the other.  Although they probably won’t show the same values for a given period, it’s a good bet they will be reasonably well correlated if the gauges are close together.  You could use our rainfall statistics tool to generate a monthly summary for each gauge to check their totals, or you could graph them together in our graphing system and use the summary table to see the totals that way.  But now, there is an even better way, using the RMB tool.  The RMB tool allows you to plot the cumulative rainfall total from one gauge against another, for any given time period that you want.  Check out the simple example below, which shows the relationship between two rainfall gauges for the past 30 days:

As you can see, there is a pretty nice relationship between the two sites, indicating that both gauges were likely working well during this time.  Now let’s look at an example where one of the gauges was not working during part of the period:

In that example, you can see that for a period while rain was continuing to be registered at the Surrey Kwantlen Park site, no new rain was being recorded at the Semiahmoo F&G rainfall station.  The effect is even more pronounced if you choose to look at several rainfall gauges at once:

 

In the above example, two other gauges continue to record nicely during the time that the Semiahmoo F&G gauge is not operating, showing even more clearly where the problem lies.

Finally, you can choose to select the average of a group of gauges for use in X-axis of your graph.  This lets you filter out the effects of any one station.  Let’s take a look at this example:

You can see in the above example that we have chosen to combine the average of 3 separate rainfall gauges to use as the X-axis in our graph.  This is great when you want to work with the average value over a larger area, rather than relying on a single gauge for comparisons.

When you are done, you can choose to print or export these graphs, and you can even save them as templates for future use!

Quantifying I&I with FlowWorks

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If you are responsible for operating a sanitary sewer system, you know tracking Inflow and Infiltration (I&I) is crucial. However, even with the best data this can be a challenging and sometimes tedious task without the tools to extract useful information from it. This is where FlowWorks comes in.

You have stations monitoring sewers and rainfall all over the city. The challenge for planners and engineers is to use this data to predict I&I in order to implement the required facilities or assess the results of infrastructure rehabilitation. To do this, a host of data is considered and some complex and often tedious calculations are undertaken. The versatile I&I tools in FlowWorks simplify many of the tasks required in I&I analysis, preventing errors and making the task actually tolerable (we won’t go so far as to say enjoyable!)  For those of us who used to do all of this in Excel spreadsheets, the first time you see FlowWorks do in seconds what used to take hours can be very exciting!. The program has already helped municipalities and consultants avoid potential overflows and resulting fines, which can come at a high cost to both the local environment and community.

For each storm event, FlowWorks takes into account Ground Water Infiltration (GWI) and Base Sanitary Flow (BSF), collectively known as Dry Weather Flow (DWF), and subtracts it from the total flow in the sanitary sewer to come up with Rainfall Induced I&I (RDII). This may not sound like a lot of effort, but when it has to be done manually across many stations and storm events it can easily add up to many hours of grueling, error-prone calculations.

Once you’ve accumulated an adequate number of storm events, FlowWorks will quickly handle plotting of an I&I envelope or the Q vs I relationship, giving you the relationship between I&I and rainfall so that return-period based I&I flows can be estimated.

All I&I analysis data can be saved for later reference or comparison and can be published for any audience, public or private. For those who have multiple monitoring sites, a seasonal set up, which includes dates of storms, dry weather patterns, etc., can be easily transferred between sites to avoid the hassles of setting up multiple sites.

If you haven’t tried out the I&I tools yet on some of your data, we encourage you to give it a try (use of the I&I tools is included in your subscription).

A True One-Stop Monitoring Shop

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Flow monitoring must be efficient in order to truly be effective. With that in mind, FlowWorks continues to promote the ease of accessing all data sources in one location. We now have the ability to add real-time United States Geological Survey (USGS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) station data into our already- robust flow monitoring network.

The additional data is comprehensive:

  • Precipitation
  • Groundwater level
  • Streamflow
  • Surface water quality
  • Tide data

The upgrades bring more than 2,500 USGS precipitation stations, 9,000 streamflow stations, 1,300 groundwater level stations and 1,900 surface water quality stations to FlowWorks users. And, NOAA allows access to almost 50 real-time tide data streams. It’s all just keystrokes away. For a list of available stations in your area click here for USGS and here for NOAA.

This real-time data is typically recorded at 15- to 60-minute intervals, stored onsite, and then transmitted to USGS offices every one to four hours, depending on the data relay technique used. Recording and transmission times may be more frequent during critical events. Plus, data from real-time sites are relayed to USGS offices via satellite, telephone, and/or radio telemetry and are available for viewing within minutes of arrival.

The benefits are impressive. In essence, FlowWorks analysis and reporting tools enable more useful information to be captured from the USGS stations. For example, clients are able to enhance their existing rain gauge network with all available stations in their monitoring area, which increases access to spatial and temporal storm information.

Gwinnett County in Georgia is using this service to bring the 18 local USGS rainfall stations into their FlowWorks platform in addition to the 12 rainfall stations coming in from their SCADA system.  The result will be a dramatic improvement in their understanding of local rainfall conditions.

Implementing these new features—additional data—from FlowWorks requires just a small one-time setup fee and no monthly charges. More importantly, accessing all your data in one spot, and in real time, will improve the decision-making process perhaps more than any other upgrade a firm could make.