Live data: Environment Canada Real-Time Hydrometric — search "Goat", "Moyie", "Kootenay", "St. Mary" by name; pair with BC River Forecast Centre streamflow map bc government fish data sources 2026 06.

Runoff window: rivers unfishable before ~July 1; clear and fish through summer creston flyfishing web research 2026 06.

Read the number in context, not raw: a discharge in cms means little on its own — what matters is whether it's high or low for today's date. Compare the live reading to the station's day-of-year normals (percentiles over the 1991–2020 record from HYDAT / MSC GeoMet hydrometric-daily-mean); the BC RFC 7-day flow map classes stations this way at a glance bc government fish data sources 2026 06.

Regulated reaches aren't weather: below a dam, flow is a release schedule set upstream, so a live gauge lags the decision. The lower Kootenay (below Lake Koocanusa / Libby Dam — USACE publishes outflow + forecasts; USGS 12301933 sits below the dam) and the Duncan River below Duncan Dam (into kootenay lake) are the local dam-controlled reaches — check the release, not just the gauge bc government fish data sources 2026 06.

Decision rule: high/murky → fish lakes (horseshoe lake, alpine); dropping/clear → rivers (goat river, moyie river).

Build-out: the BC Freshwater Atlas-based data hub layers flows over the stream network for reach-level decisions (kootenay-river-data-hub.html) bc government fish data sources 2026 06.

CSV endpoint (real-time datamart; the old /hydrometric/ path 404s since ~mid-2026): https://dd.weather.gc.ca/today/hydrometric/csv/BC/hourly/BC_<ID>_hourly_hydrometric.csv — .../daily/ gives ~30 days. Data is provisional (QA flag 1).

Water temperature comes from a different service (dates required, no CORS — server-side only): https://wateroffice.ec.gc.ca/services/real_time_data/csv/inline?stations[]=<ID>&parameters[]=5&start_date=…&end_date=… — hoot-owl watch threshold ≈ 20 °C afternoons; see water temperature sources 2026 07.

Whether a discontinued Goat River gauge exists in the HYDAT archive is unresolved. #open

goat river / moyie river — flow-sensitive waters.

reading river flows feeds the river-vs-lake call alongside chironomid under indicator backups.

thermal thresholds by species — why the 20 °C hoot-owl threshold sits where it does.

fishery health systems — the same diagnostic at watershed scale rather than day scale.

Gov data sources — gauges and tools.

Creston web research — runoff timing.