b'FROM HAND-DRAWN CURVES TO FULLY DIGITAL CONFIDENCEHow NCPA Streamlined Compliance and Built USGS-Grade Data Integrity with AquariusHow NCPA Streamlined Compliance The Turning Point: Modernizing a and Built USGS-Grade Data IntegrityMission-Critical Mandatewith Aquarius After testing multiple systems over 18 months, NCPA selected Even in an age of digital transformation, many critical infrastructureAquarius for its alignment with USGS standards, support for agencies still rely on outdated tools for water data management geographically dispersed teams, and commitment to ongoing hand-drawn rating curves, paper logs, and aging software thatdevelopment.barely keeps up. For teams juggling hydropower, environmental compliance, and agency reporting, this creates risk at every turn: lost time, manual errors, and audit vulnerabilities.Aquarius was the best solution on the market, At the Northern California Power Agency (NCPA), those risksand we were impressed with the amount of became too real. As a FERC cooperator and data provider to thedevelopment effort being spent to make it an USGS, NCPA needed to modernizenot just for efficiency, but toeven better product.protect the credibility of their operations and reporting.NORTHERN CALIFORNIA POWER AGENCY OPERATIONS TEAMThe Challenge: Hand-Drawing Curvesin a Digital WorldBefore Aquarius, NCPA engineers used oversized log-log paper andNow deployed across 38 monitoring sitesincluding stream outdated software to manually calculate and visualize dischargegauges, temperature sensors, AVM pipe discharge stations, data. The process was slow, error-prone, and poorly suited for theand moreAquarius powers NCPAs real-time and historical regulatory rigor of FERC, the California Department of Fish andcompliance infrastructure.Game, and the USGS.Prior to deploying Aquarius, we had a very limited software package that supported only very basic USGS computations.It had poor visualization tools, and working the record was slowand painful.Without a centralized, audit-ready system, the team struggled to meet compliance demands while keeping operations fluid and collaborative across their dispersed network.'