The La Plata basin, with an area of 3,200,000 km2, is the second largest catchment area in South America and one of the largest in the world. It covers large territories belonging to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. To facilitate access and exchange of hydrological data provided by the National Hydrological Services of the Plata basin, CHy supported the development of a technical solution, called PLATA-HIS (see LaPlataHIS.pdf [43]). The aim was to provide additional operational capability, in particular for in situ water observations, as a federated resource for National Hydrological Services.
Using a combination of WMO and OGC web services, the PLATA-HIS (http://hydrolite.ddns.net/hisPlata/ ) is designed as a “service stack framework” that identi?es three types of services as essential to sharing hydrological information across the web: catalogue services, metadata services and data services. These three services work together to completely index, describe and provide access to hydrological time series in the La Plata river basin.
The system has been successfully used as follows: definition of a monitoring network of hydrological and meteorological stations maintained by countries belonging to the La Plata basin; analysis and optimization of the hydrological monitoring network at the basin scale; increased collaboration between countries to improve network design and lower costs; collaborative calibration of hydro-meteorological instruments; free exchange of meteorological and hydrological observations; common policies to control data quality; and creation of archives of hydrological data to improve services and respond faster to natural disasters.