AW Website Reinstates Its Runnability Distinctions

American Whitewater has revamped the programming behind its popular state-by-state river pages. Announced in November, the changes were directed at improving performance and reliability, making maintenance easier, and providing better display of information.

There are no dramatic user-facing changes, but as explained in a post on the AW site, flow graphs have much greater resolution and flow ranges are more clearly defined and displayed. 

A beneficial change, although not dramatic, is the return to a five-color scheme for river levels in which red= below recommended, light green= low runnable, medium green=runnable, dark green=high runnable, and blue=above recommended. A major overhaul in 2019 left the river pages with just one green/runnable category, which led to concern that less experienced paddlers might be ill-served by the lack of difficulty distinctions. "I like the return of the missing categories," says Tony Allred, who edits many river pages for our area, "because the 'high runnable' category is useful in signaling to lower-skill-level (for that reach) paddlers that it might be too high for them." Meanwhile, providing for distinction among low runnable, runnable, and high runnable keeps "above recommended" from having to be set artificially low.

As one who works on pages behind the scenes, Tony also is pleased that AW has made editing  "simpler and more intuitive than before," and that editors can now provide levels from multiple gages relevant to a river stretch, rather than being limited to one.

One other change involves links to source data. AW draws its gage information from U.S. Geological Survey and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. Links to the USGS and NOAA source pages are now more evident and consistent, being provided in boxes clearly seen to the right of the graphs on the individual river run detail pages. 

The AW site presents data for more than 6,000 whitewater runs.

—Larry Lempert