OneRain Announces Release of Contrail® 8 Software Suite

Published on January 6, 2020 [Updated April 16, 2020]

Contrail® 8 is here! — OneRain Incorporated is pleased to announce a major new software release for its flagship platform.

In keeping pace with the ever-changing technologies, advances in security, and evolving requirements of their clients, OneRain announced the release of Contrail® 8—the next generation of their flagship software suite for real-time environmental monitoring.

 

Contrail is the leading enterprise-level software platform that collects, processes and delivers real-time environmental sensor data from local hydrometeorological networks and other external sources for Web-based dissemination, visualization, monitoring and automated alerting. The software provides critical information to help users understand and manage their environmental monitoring-related missions—from flood and road weather safety, to dams, stormwater, wastewater and water resource management—and is key to effective situational awareness and timely decision-making.

Included in this major update is the core Contrail software package, as well as Contrail Inventory plus, Contrail Camera, and Contrail TDMA Manager.

 

 

WHAT NEW FEATURES TO EXPECT WITH CONTRAIL 8

Contrail 8 features include the latest base operating system and core libraries, updated Web design with modern framework, and all-new widgets and graphing features. The release of Contrail 8 comes with a bevy of new features and improvements.

Latest Operating System

Contrail 8 runs on the newly released major version of Enterprise Linux operating system, CentOS 8. CentOS 8 incorporates important advancements in security hardening and optimized performance. It’s one of the most robust operating systems available, where the reliability and stability of systems is key. With this new operating system, Contrail utilizes all of the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Python, Perl, etc.

Modern Design

A new front-end framework uses modern libraries and updated visualization that optimizes for mobile devices.

Contrail Administration screen

New Graphing Features

New graphing enhancements to easily visualize the data that is important, including historical mode, data quality values, easier axis scaling.

Contrail Graphing Features

Lots of New Widgets

Several new widgets for Contrail Dashboards have been added, including Wind Speed, Wind Direction, Wind Rose, Wind Direction Distribution, Contrail Camera Image browser for easily viewing previous images, Google Drive for embedding documents, YouTube, Dark Sky, Twitter, Earth Networks, and National Weather Service (NWS), and more…

Contrail Wind Widgets

 

Contrail Camera Widget

New Data Formats

Contrail is now able to collect new and expanded data formats and offers seamless integration for sending SHEF data to the National Weather Service and others.

Contrail Data Formats for National Weather Service and others

Create New Alert Rules for Contrail Camera

Add Rules to be notified of image latency, and more! An email alert can be generated if Contrail Camera has not received an image in a predetermined amount of time. Additionally, Contrail Camera can alarm on certain image metrics of interest over particular time periods, including if duplicate images are received, a camera is over reporting, or if a image data exceeds certain thresholds.

Alert Rules for Contrail Camera

 

All-New “Help” Website

An all new Help website has been created to make it easier to find the relevant information for general users and system administrators. The website can be found at help.onerain.com, includes Knowledge Base, Articles, Glossary, FAQs, and the opportunity to Chat with our Contrail Support team.

OneRain Help Website

Data Annotations

Users can easily add more information within their data with data annotations. Contrail now includes annotations for documenting any additional information the system administrator would like to show: marking the start/end of a historical event, noting an instrumentation change, or indicating the beginning of a procedural change.

 

Data Annotations

Much More…

New collector and services managers allow for more easily configuring, including easily switching data collection and services between instances of Contrail instances for faster disaster recovery. Users can add notes to any alarm rule to document with additional information. Updated search allows users to quickly get to the information more easily. Enhanced support tools allow for the Contrail team to more easily diagnose and troubleshoot any issues with the software. Additional software configuration options for base station owners.

 

UPGRADING TO CONTRAIL 8

Contrail 8 is considered a major operating system and application upgrade from Contrail 6, which will now be placed into Long-term Support (LTS). This software upgrade is available to all OneRain-hosted Contrail Web and Contrail Server users as well as licensed on-premise Contrail Base Station users current with standard maintenance.

This upgrade is automatic for Contrail Shared Web and Contrail Cloud Server instances—there’s no need for these customers to take action to receive the update.

For agencies that are running licensed on-premise Contrail Base Station, OneRain’s Contrail Support team will work directly with the agency’s IT department to provision a new server to facilitate the upgrade and migration from existing servers, and enable the running of systems in parallel for a period during the transition.

 

About OneRain Incorporated
Since 1992, OneRain has been providing solutions that optimize water management, heighten regulatory compliance, achieve successful civil works, and save lives. Headquartered in Longmont, Colorado, OneRain’s software and services deliver mission critical information to serve clients responsible for flood early warning, dam safety and reservoir operations, water resources, stormwater and wastewater management. For more information, visit www.onerain.com or call 800-758-RAIN (7246).

OneRain is proud to be part of Advanced Environmental Monitoring – a family of innovators.

OneRain Announces Title Sponsorship of National Hydrologic Warning Council’s 13th Biennial Conference

OneRain Incorporated, a leading provider of software, instrumentation, and systems integration to the Water Resource Management, Flood Warning, Post-Wildfire Mitigation, and Road Weather industries, is the title sponsor for the National Hydrologic Warning Council’s 13th Biennial Training Conference & Expo, June 17-20, 2019 in Louisville, Kentucky. More than 200 attendees from local, state, and emergency response agencies from around the U.S. and abroad are expected to attend the event being held in Galt House Hotel.

“This is a really important conference as we continue to see the growing risks of flooding with the steady increase in extreme hydro-meteorological events, dam failure and levee breach incidents, and destructive wild fires that are impacting the world.” said OneRain’s CEO, James Logan.

This year’s conference is devoted to real-time hydrologic warning systems and how these systems and associated technologies assist local officials with hydrologic hazard preparedness, emergency response, recovery and mitigation. It is the largest conference focused on this topic in the United States.

OneRain, part of the AE Monitoring family of companies, will present on best practices for creating more reliable decision support systems and risk reduction through innovative technologies used in real-time early warning systems. Several educational sessions and training workshops will be presented by the AE Monitoring family over the course of three days:

 

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

8:30 am – 10:00 am: “Enhancements to HSE Hardware“, presented by Carrie Lery and Tom Ogden, High Sierra Electronics, CA

8:30 am – 10:00 am: “How Do You Model a Flood Anyway?“, presented by Baxter Vieux, Vieux & Associates, OK

1:30 pm – 3:00 pm: “Twenty-Twenty Vision – Leveraging the Power of Live Cameras in Contrail®“, presented by Charles Yost and Scott Bores, OneRain Incorporated, CO

 

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

11:00 am – 11:30 am: “The Internet of Things and Seven Things You Should Know About How It Will Impact the Flood Warning, Dam Safety, and Levee Safety lndustries“, presented by James Logan, OneRain Incorporated, CO

2:30 pm – 3:00 pm: “Bexar County Texas HALT System“, presented by Dave Wegman, Bexar County, San Antonio, TX and Tom Ogden, High Sierra Electronics, CA

 

Thursday, June 20, 2019

9:00 am – 9:30 am: “South East Queensland ALERT2 Trial – Increased Reliability & Accuracy of Flood Warning Data in Australia“, presented by Mike Zucosky, OneRain Incorporated, CO

9:30 am – 10:00 am: “Enhancing Hydro-Met Warning Systems with the Internet of Things“, presented by Zoë Fyfe, FTS Inc., BC, Canada

10:30 am – 11:00 am: “System Resiliency, Eliminating Single Points of Failure“, presented by Scott Bores, OneRain Incorporated, CO

1:30 pm – 2:00 pm: “ALERT2 Network Design” presented by James Logan, OneRain Incorporated, CO and Carrie Lery, High Sierra Electronics, CA

 

The full conference agenda and schedule is available here.  For more information about the 2019 NHWC Training Conference & Expo and event registration, go to www.hydrologicwarning.org

 

About OneRain Incorporated
Since 1992, OneRain has been providing solutions that optimize water management, heighten regulatory compliance, achieve successful civil works, and save lives. Headquartered in Longmont, Colorado, OneRain’s software and services deliver mission critical information to serve clients responsible for flood early warning, dam safety and reservoir operations, water resources, stormwater and wastewater management. For more information, visit www.onerain.com or call 800-758-RAIN (7246).

BIA Safety of Dams Early Warning System

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is responsible for 910 dams on Indian reservations; of which 137 are classified as high- and significant-hazard. Having been built several decades ago, many of the dams are not aging well and pose dam safety risks. BIA is actively modifying some of these dams to an acceptable safety level, however, with limited budgetary funds each year, a number of dams go unmodified until funding becomes available.

As part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Safety of Dams program, BIA built and operates the National Monitoring Center, a 24/7/365-manned emergency operations center in Montana to ensure the safety of downstream communities. The dams are scattered on tribal lands throughout the western U.S.

Bureau of Indian Affairs Dam Safety Program uses OneRain’s Real-time Hazardous Flood Detection Solutions to support their National Monitoring Center.

The National Monitoring Center (NMC) Early Warning System is built upon the integrated real-time monitoring instrumentation, telemetry and centralized enterprise data collection services infrastructure developed by OneRain.

Under contract with the BIA since 2003, OneRain has been working in partnership with the agency’s Safety of Dams program supporting and continually enhancing the Early Warning System (EWS) in all aspects. OneRain and the NMC’s emergency personnel currently monitor more than 2,637 sensors for more than 112 high-hazard dams in real time. Key to the success of the program is knowing how well the instrumentation and sensors are performing at all times. The program includes daily system performance analysis that detects outages automatically. BIA, with OneRain, has an excellent preventive, proactive and routine inspection maintenance schedule in place for the monitoring instrumentation for ensuring that the flood warning network provides accurate, reliable information during a hydrological event.

Several sensors comprise OneRain’s remote dam safety monitoring instrumentation and gauges shown here at Lower Mundo Dam – part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Safety of Dams program.

 

The majority of the dam sites are on tribal lands in extremely remote locations. The Safety of Dams program uses OneRain’s StormLink™ real-time satellite systems to relay data from sensing sites and from local line-of-sight ALERT/ALERT2 or SCADA systems to OneRain’s data center where its decision-support software, Contrail®, continually collects and monitors rainfall, water level, stage height, flow rate data and more, in real time.

All the data coming in are automatically processed, analyzed and disseminated in real time in Contrail. Alarms events are triggered based on advanced customized rules and the system automatically generates and sends out early warning notifications with Emergency Action Plan (EAP) procedures to alert emergency personnel of possible hazardous and flood-threatening conditions. For example: if the stage height is near a bank full threshold, and it has rained more than 0.5-inches upstream in the last half hour, then an alarm is triggered. The alert notification system supports sending messages to cell phones, email, and text pagers. BIA and NMC staff have 24/7 secure web-based access to the system where they can see up-to-the-minute current conditions on high resolution maps, dashboards, charts, graphs and tables.

With OneRain’s system, the BIA and the NMC know at all times that their dam safety systems are up and running, or that it needs attention.

The National Monitoring Center is the key in providing significantly enhanced public safety to populations downstream from Bureau of Indian Affairs high-risk, significant-hazard dams.

 

#damearlywarningsystem #damsafety #safetyofdams

 

The Hydrologic Information You Care About at Your Fingertips

LONGMONT, COLORADO, September 1, 2015 – Today, OneRain launched several new features in Contrail that include significant enhancements for reporting—the availability of custom dashboards and real-time widgets so users can instantly see the information that’s most important to them for hydrometeorological monitoring and assessment.

Contrail is the leading hydrometeorological enterprise software platform that provides real-time information to those responsible for managing water resources, flood forecasting and early warning, monitoring the safety of dams, reservoir operations and more. The ability to see at once, the information and indicators that matter most for assessment and decision-making, is of great importance. With the introduction of the Dashboards and Widgets feature in Contrail, system administrators can now create their own custom dashboard pages so that critical hydrometeorological data points that are most relevant and important to their operations are visually brought into focus.

“Our users are increasingly seeking visual and interactive ways to get to the data that matters most to them. Our focus is on continuing to evolve our Contrail platform and introduce innovative features that deliver highly engaging experiences for our users,” said Mike Zucosky, Director of Operations at OneRain.

Each custom dashboard page can show related datasets (widgets) grouped together based on the information that users would like to view. There are several dashboard layout options to choose from and widgets placed within the dashboard can be easily arranged (drag and drop) edited, copied and deleted. Administrators can choose to display each dashboard in the administration environments only, or share a dashboard with general users.

Contrail’s new dashboard and widgets feature is important when monitoring conditions and indicators that impact operations and decision-making. For example, administrators can create dashboards that help them in their day-to-day decisions, or create a dashboard “on-the-fly” during an extreme storm event to track and monitor specific sites that may be at high risk of flooding.

Also included in today’s launch is Contrail’s new Remote Module where system administrators of on-premise Contrail Base Stations can check for software, OS and security updates and choose to perform updates on their own schedule.

Update Availability
This software update is available to all OneRain-hosted Contrail Web and Contrail Server users as well as licensed on-premise Contrail Base Station users current with standard maintenance. There’s no need for customers to take action to receive the update. This update will be performed during OneRain’s standard software maintenance and updates schedule each month, during which Contrail Base Station software updates and operating system patches, if pending, will be deployed by OneRain personnel.

Training
In addition to OneRain’s monthly Contrail training sessions, complimentary webinar training sessions are available to OneRain clients after this update. Please contact OneRain to arrange refresher training or if you’d just like to learn more about these recent enhancements. OneRain offers a variety of online webinar training sessions for their software and solutions. These training sessions ensure users keep current and gain the maximum value from OneRain software and products.

About OneRain Incorporated
For more than 20 years, OneRain has been providing private and public sector clients across the United States and around the world with solutions to optimize water management, heighten regulatory compliance, achieve successful civil works, and save lives. OneRain’s innovative products and services serve clients in Flood Early Warning and Emergency Management, Dam Safety and Reservoir Operations, Water Resource Management, Post Wild Fire Mitigation, Urban Pluvial Water Management, and Stormwater and Wastewater Management. For more information, visit www.onerain.com or call 1-800-758-RAIN (7246).

Contact Information
Rosemarie O’Connell, Sales & Marketing, OneRain Incorporated Phone: 303-774-2033 | E-mail: information@onerain.com

 

OneRain Showcases Its Active Dam Safety Monitoring Solution at Dam Safety Conference

LONGMONT, COLORADO, August, 2015 – OneRain is pleased to announce its participation at Dam Safety 2015 where they will be showcasing their Active Dam Safety Monitoring solution. Dam Safety 2015 is the official national conference of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO), the premier educational and networking event in the dam safety industry that attracts attendees from all over the world. This year’s conference takes place September 13-17, 2015 in New Orleans, Louisiana. OneRain supports Dam Safety Monitoring programs where high-risk and significant-hazard designated dams pose a risk to extensive property damage or possible loss of human life due to mis-operation or dam failure.

Colorado-based OneRain (formerly DIAD Inc.) has been designing, building, rehabilitating, operating and maintaining real-time environmental monitoring systems to keep tabs on flood-prone waterways and dams since 1992. Their Active Dam Safety Monitoring solution can detect and alert threatening conditions in advance, automatically notifying dam owners and officials tasked with the safe operation and maintenance of the dam with crucial real-time information so they can make timely, well-informed operational decisions.

OneRain Gauge Instrumentation at Spinney Mountain Reservoir
OneRain provides real-time monitoring and maintains gauge instrumentation at Spinney Mountain Reservoir, Aurora, Colorado. Photo credit: Scott Bores, Manager of Field Engineering, OneRain Inc.

Dam owners are responsible for maintaining a dam in a safe condition to reduce the risk a dam creates. Safe, cost-effective dam operations require reliable, timely environmental and dam status information.

“When it comes to Dam Safety monitoring programs, OneRain takes a complete systems approach to ensure dependable real-time remote monitoring,” says James Logan, OneRain’s CEO. Many of the dam monitoring sites are in very remote areas but with populations downstream that could be affected if anything goes wrong. For these early warning systems to be successful, highly available, reliable, accurate and timely data are paramount. Early detection of threatening conditions and severe storm events that could lead to failure, allows time for dam officials to issue early warnings, determine what areas might be affected and who may need to be evacuated. “To that end, OneRain’s complete solution approach gives us more effective control over the delivery, timeliness, quality and accuracy of the data that decision-makers rely on in making their assessments,” says Logan.

OneRain’s end-to-end Active Dam Safety Monitoring solution provides critical decision-support information in real time. The system provides Web and local visualization services, real-time satellite telemetry, and telemetry system integration as well as options for real-time gauge-adjusted radar-rainfall (GARR) data, basin-average rainfall and predictive/forecast rainfall estimates. GARR provides highly accurate rainfall estimates on a pixel and basin-accumulated basis and creates the most accurate estimates of reservoir inflow from rain currently available.

Data are gathered from an array of integrated real-time monitoring gauge instruments measuring reservoir elevation, flow, spillway, discharge, weather, rainfall, float switches, wind, temperature, vibrating wire piezometers, tiltmeters, inclinometers, seismic and more—these sensor data are collected, processed, analyzed and disseminated in real time by Contrail®, OneRain’s enterprise visualization and decision-support software. Dam operations personnel are able to access the system round-the-clock to know what’s going on at any particular point in time. Up-to-the-minute reporting is presented graphically in geo-referenced maps and visually informative dashboards that enable key personnel to quickly evaluate conditions at the dams. Designated officials and response personnel also receive automated advance warnings of potential problems via text message and email when predefined conditions and sensor thresholds are exceeded. Emergency Action Plan-related information is often included with these alert notifications to assist responding safety and emergency personnel.

Equally important is the quality of gauge instrumentation maintenance at the dam. Routine, preventative maintenance of the instrumentation at each dam location is key to ensuring that the early warning network provides accurate, reliable information during a hydrological event. OneRain’s Field Services group also provides these services and conducts best practices training on preventative, breakdown and reliablity-centered maintenance programs to ensure the highest network performance.

If you’re planning to be in New Orleans for the ASDSO Dam Safety 2015 Conference, be sure to stop by OneRain’s booth #300 to see a demo of their Active Dam Safety Monitoring solution.

About OneRain Incorporated
For more than 20 years, OneRain has been providing private and public sector clients across the United States and around the world with solutions to optimize water management, heighten regulatory compliance, achieve successful civil works, and save lives. OneRain’s innovative products and services serve clients in Flood Early Warning and Emergency Management, Dam Safety and Reservoir Operations, Water Resource Management, Post Wild Fire Mitigation, Urban Pluvial Water Management, and Stormwater and Wastewater Management. For more information, visit www.onerain.com or call 1-800-758-RAIN (7246).

Contact Information
Rosemarie O’Connell, Sales & Marketing, OneRain Incorporated Phone: 303-774-2033 | E-mail: information@onerain.com

About ASDSO
The failure of dams and the great destruction and loss of life failures often cause, is a matter of deep concern to the members of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO). ASDSO is a national non-profit organization serving state dam safety programs and the broader dam safety community, which includes federal dam safety professionals, dam owners and operators, engineering consultants, emergency managers, manufacturers, suppliers, academia, contractors, and others interested in improving dam safety.