Every time a storm rolls through Southwest Ohio, the Miami Conservancy District’s flood protection system goes to work — and so does our team. With each rain event, our field operations staff measure rising water levels from more than 300 observation wells across all five of our dams.
These readings are used to monitor how water moves beneath each dam, helping us evaluate the performance of our flood protection infrastructure under pressure.
Over decades, this monitoring has built a rich dataset — more than 2 million data points spanning 40 to 50 years — that helps us:
But there’s a challenge: analyzing this wealth of information can take hours per well, and a full systemwide analysis hasn’t been feasible for over a decade.
That’s changing.
MCD’s engineers are building new capacity to modernize and streamline our data analysis. Engineering Associate Jess Moyer is leading the development of custom code that will automate this process.
“In just a few clicks and a few seconds, we’ll be able to generate the same results that used to require hours and multiple spreadsheets,” Jess says. “And we’ve integrated it into MCD’s GIS-based field data collection tools, so the analysis can be automatically updated every time staff take a reading in the field — even during major storms.”
This is innovation in action — just one of the many ways MCD continues to modernize and lead in water management, more than a century after our founding.
