CONAGUA

Overview:

CONAGUA stands for Comision Nacional del Agua (National Water Commision). It is Mexico’s central authority for water management. Established in 1989, CONAGUA is responsible for management, preservation, and distribution of water resources in Mexico.

Data Source:

The streamflow observations from CONAGUA are naturally in a Microsoft database format. These can be obtained from the CONAGUA Webpage. Mirce, a PhD student at the time from UNAM, converts these one-at-a-time to a “csv” format. The filenames have a gauge identifier in them. There is also another file that has the lat/lon of the gauge. The streamflow is in cubic meters per second (cms). Each of the column headers in the daily observation files are as follows:

pk_ano = Year, pk_mes = Month, ngasto_d01, d02 ... = Streamflow in days.

Observation Converter:

The obs converter is a program called CONAGUA_convert_streamflow and meta_data_filehas a namelist by the name &CONAGUA_convert_streamflow. Namelists start with an ampersand ‘&’ and terminate with a slash ‘/’.

&CONAGUA_convert_streamflow_nml
 meta_data_file         = 'LaSierra/Observations/LaSierra_strm_pts.csv'
 data_file_list         = 'LaSierra/Observations/daily_files_list.txt'
 obs_out_file           = 'obs_seq.out'
 obs_fraction_for_error = 0.05
 obs_min_err_sd         = 0.5
 debug                  = .true.
/

This namelist provides control over the kind of observations (streamflow) to extract from the file in addition to their uncertainties.

Contents	Type	Description
meta_data_file	character(len=256)	Pathname to the data file
data_file_list	character(len=256)	List of data files if processing several days at once
obs_out_file	character(len=256)	Name of output DART-style file: obs_seq.out
obs_fraction_for_error	real	Factor to parametrize the streamflow observation error: obs error variance = obs value * obs_fraction_for_error
obs_min_err_sd	character(len=256)	Lower bound for the observation error variance
debug	logical	A switch to make the converter more verbose