Citation:

Gains-Germain, L., C. Nietch, G. Youngstrom, T. Linscome-Hatfield, E. Harmeling, J. Lazorchak, AND S. Keely. Interagency Data Aggregation to Support HAB Monitoring of the Ohio River. 13th National Monitoring Conference, Virginia Beach, VA, April 24 - 28, 2023.

Impact/Purpose:

Presentation on aggregating data from multiple agencies for evaluating risk of cyanobacteria blooms on the Ohio River.

Description:

Data are retrieved in real-time from three agency specific websites to support monitoring of harmful algal bloom (HAB) status on the Ohio River. At high noon each day, an automated program sends a request to the data application programming interfaces (APIs) at usgs.water.gov, water.usace.army.mil, and HydroVu’s telemetry system web portal that serves data collected by the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO). Once the data are retrieved, the script processes and aggregates it in preparation for modeling and analytics. Data are aggregated to the daily level for the purposes of the visuals and predictive models served at https://orsanco-hab.shinyapps.io/shiny-ohio-river/#. The data processing is endpoint driven, which facilitates efficient data organization and transfer. The data are stored on the cloud using a MySQL database instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The data are then easily accessed by shinyapps.io for public display. Any other front or back end software can easily access the data, facilitating easy upgrade and collaboration. The processing and retrieval program is currently run from internal servers, though it could be run from any computing platform such as an AWS EC2 instance. The approach is easily replicable and a good long-term solution since it leverages widely used and well supported database and cloud-based tools.

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