This website is part of the Danube Hydrological Information System (DanubeHIS) for viewing the near-real time data on water levels, river discharge, water temperature and precipitation made available by data providers throughout the Danube River Basin.
Short history
The Flood Protection Expert Group (FP EG) of the ICPDR proposed the development of the DanubeHIS already in 2016, as it considered it as a very useful tool for providing standardized data for ICPDR project partners in the Danube River Basin in future. The ICPDR welcomed this proposal of the FP EG and asked the FP EG to agree about the details of the concept and scope of the DanubeHIS, asked the Secretariat in cooperation with the FP EG and IMGIS EG to prepare the relevant policy document for data exchange, and encouraged the ICPDR Contracting Parties to engage the national hydrometeorological services in the DanubeHIS development.
The FP EG agreed at its 32nd meeting the following scope of the DanubeHIS: Providing Danube basin-wide level basic hydrological and meteorological near real time data in a standard format, and, if possible, the validated long-term data series, for flood risk management or for any water related scientific activities in DRB.
The INTERREG funded DAREFFORT project (2018-2021) developed the open source data exchange software HyMeDES Environet (https://github.com/environet/environet). This software minimises the effort for national data providers to transfer their data to the central platform, but at the same time meets high standards of data availability and quality.
Once the data exchange software was developed and established at most data providers, the ICPDR Secretariat installed and started operating the central platform for testing the data exchange and further improving the software and complementing it with a web portal for end users. The FP EG guided this development, discussing and agreeing on implementation details, for example using the Flood Protection Reporting Units (see map download below) defined in 2010 as subbasins in the DanubeHIS. The group also agreed that Q100 and low water levels can be displayed on the DanubeHIS, if they are available.
Current status
The ICPDR operates and maintains the DanubeHIS. Data providers throughout the Danube River Basin use this platform to make basic data easily available from selected hydrological and meteorological stations. The data can be viewed online on maps, charts and tables. Registered users can also downloaded data in the open standard WaterML 2.0, as well as XLS and CSV file formats.
Data submission and sharing is on a voluntary basis for data providers and defined in the “DanubeHIS Policy document for data exchange”.
At its launch in December 2023, the DanubeHIS already comprises more than 1100 stations.
Besides the automated, near-real time sharing of raw data, further goals are to add validated long-term time series and to make this data available for flood risk management or for any water related scientific activities in the Danube River Basin.
