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Rainy River Basin StreamStats

StreamStats for the Rainy River Basin was developed in cooperation with the International Joint Commission, which regulates Canada/U.S. shared water uses and investigates transboundary issues and recommends solutions.

The StreamStats application for the Lake of the Woods-Rainy River Basin (RRB) represents the first binational application of StreamStats. The RRB is approximately half in Canada and half in the U.S, and includes area in the Canadian Provinces of Ontario and Manitoba, as well as in the U.S. State of Minnesota. 

Users can delineate basin boundaries, compute basin characteristics, and estimate peak flows for gaged and ungaged streams and rivers in the StreamStats application. Peak flow estimates for can be estimated using regression equations developed by Sanocki and others (2019). Users can also download shapefiles of the boundaries, basin characteristics, and peak-flow estimates for user-selected sites.

  • Sanocki, C.A., Williams-Sether, T., Steeves, P.A., and Christensen, V.G., 2019, Techniques for estimating the magnitude and frequency of peak flows on small streams in the binational U.S. and Canadian Lake of the Woods–Rainy River Basin upstream from Kenora, Ontario, Canada, based on data through water year 2013: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2019–5012, 17 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20195012

Basin and peak flow characteristics available in the Lake of the Woods-Rainy River Basin:

  • Drainage area, in square miles;
  • Mean annual precipitation, in inches;
  • Mean annual temperature, degrees Fahrenheit;
  • Mean annual runoff, in inches;
  • Percentage of area of storage (lakes, ponds, reservoirs, and wetlands)
  • Percentage of area of wetlands
  • Stream slope, in feet per mile
  • Peak flow estimates for annual exceedance probabilities of 66.7-, 50-, 20-, 10-, 4-, 2-, 1-, and 0.2-percent

Click on this link to obtain general information on the Rainy River Basin application, as well as specific sources and computation methods for basin characteristics.

 

NOTE: StreamStats displays USGS topographic maps as the default base layer on the digital map. As a result, when zoomed into areas in Canada, a base layer will not automatically appear. In the Map Layers frame to the left of the map, users can choose to display either the World Topo or the Canadian Topo layer as the base map in these situations.