Featured Projects — Software River Status, Mobile Web Application

The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) collects precipitation, flow, river stage, reservoir elevation, and water-quality time series for thousands of locations across the country. Since the mid-1990s, we’ve been working with the Corps to manage their real-time and historic-time series data in the Corps Water Management System (CWMS) Oracle database. With support from the USACE Nashville District Office and the USACE Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC), we developed a publicly accessible web application to display time series data stored in the CWMS database with mobile, tablet, and desktop views. Development of the River Status application began in 2013 and the app was fielded in 2014.

The web app allows users to select lake, water quality, precipitation, and stream gage locations through both a list and interactive map interface. Users can identify favorite locations for easy reference and can also find nearby stations based on their geographic location. The list view includes sparkline presentation of recent data from each gage, which gives users a convenient overview of the river system status.

We used the CWMS Oracle database API and HEC Java Plotting Library to develop the application, along with open-source libraries including jQuery Mobile, Spring Framework, Leaflet JavaScript Mapping, and Hibernate ORM. The Web application was fielded on Apache Tomcat.

Results and benefits

We developed and fielded the River Status Web application for the Nashville District very quickly. The Nashville implementation received many positive reviews and the Corps is now considering a nationwide deployment.

Screenshot of application showing interface and map with markers.

Screenshot of application showing water level chart.

River Status, mobile web application dialogs.