Alberta is littered with quality, accessible trout streams, but a lot of travel is involved in exploration. Your buddies and an online search can’t always prepare you for current river conditions, how do you know what to expect?
The Alberta River Basins (https://rivers.alberta.ca/) website and mobile app is a mapping tool that provides up to date geography-based data for river, lake, precipitation, and snow pillow stations in Alberta.
Flow rates are recorded in hydrographs and tables, and updated regularly. You can see if flow rates have been stable, rising, or dropping. Quick spikes usually infer a rainfall and lead to dirty water. Depending on the severity, checking recent flows might save a trip to a blown-out river.
Annual to hourly data is available, and graphs give you previous year historic upper and lower quartiles. Annual hydrographs show the progression of pre-runoff, runoff, and post-runoff, so you can approximate the timing on any given stream.
The website also includes water temperature data for certain stations. This is helpful for following recent water temperature trends and forecasting when temperatures will be too high.
Snow pillow stations give you an idea of the alpine snowpack.
Important water advisories are also posted on here.
