Environment Canterbury Open Data Portal
Environment Canterbury's open data portal with freshwater monitoring, river flow (135+ continuous flow sites), rainfall and natural resource datasets in machine-readable formats under CC BY 4.0.
data.ecan.govt.nz
At a glance
- Region
- New Zealand (Oceania)
- Coverage
- Canterbury
- Access
- Free
- Category
- Government
- Last updated
- 2025
What's inside
- River Flow
- Rainfall
- Water Quality
Terms explained
What you can do with it
Typical work that data of this type supports.
- 01
Design flows
Estimate 1-in-50 and 1-in-100 year floods for bridges, culverts and spillways.
Because it has: River Flow
- 02
Low flows
Set environmental flows and check what is left in the river in a dry year.
- 03
Design storms
Build rainfall intensity-duration-frequency curves for drainage design.
Because it has: Rainfall
Where AI adds value
Ideas for machine learning and AI agents built on this kind of data.
- 01
Flow forecasting
Train LSTM-style models on past records to forecast river levels and flow days ahead.
- 02
Ungauged basins
Combine with catchment data to estimate flow where there is no gauge.
- 03
Downscaling
Turn coarse rainfall grids into field or ward scale estimates.
Machine access and documentation
Open API
Environmental Observations API via apidevelopers.ecan.govt.nz
Licence: Open data
Listed in our registry of open water APIs, which WaterDataGPT can query live.
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