White River Data

Live water conditions and a flow-driven fishing report for the White Hole on the White River below Bull Shoals Dam, Arkansas.

The page: https://briancarroll.cool/WhiteRiverData/white_hole_conditions.html

It rebuilds every hour on the hour. All times on it are Central, the dam's time.

Reading the page

Top to bottom:

Section	What it tells you
Banner	Can you wade right now, and is a rise or a drop on its way. A third line names the day's scheduled peak when high water is coming.
Current Conditions	The flow at White Hole now, wading and boating verdicts, sunrise and sunset with the low-light windows, and the tailwater's temperature and oxygen from the USGS gauge with a trout verdict (low oxygen means land fish fast).
Arrivals at White Hole	The water on its way to you, in the order it gets there. The top row is what is in front of you now. "Released" rows are the dam's hourly readings, "scheduled" rows are SWPA's generation plan for the rest of today and, once posted around 5 PM, tomorrow. Falling water shows as a window: when the level starts dropping and when it is fully down.
Water Flow Progression	The chart: which release is at which landmark right now, dam to White Hole, with map pins for each landmark.
Fishing Report	Collapsed by default. Timing around the generation changes, then a tap-to-pick strip with a playbook for every flow band: where to go, boat handling, spin and fly tackle split into a browns program and a rainbows program. Season notes, regulations, a gear check, and the rigging reference follow.

Wading verdicts by flow at White Hole:

CFS	Wading	Boating
under 2,000	Excellent	Low water
2,000 to 5,000	Still wadable	Ideal
5,000 to 10,000	No wading	Ideal
over 10,000	No wading	High water

Travel times come from His Place Resort's observational table and have not yet been checked against the river. Judge wading safety on site.

After a trip

Write the trip up and let the fishing report learn from it:

cp journal/TEMPLATE.md journal/entries/2026-10-06-first-morning.md

Fill the front matter and the catch table (one row per fish, with the clock time), then:

uv run python scripts/build_journal.py

You get journal/build/catches_report.md: every fish with the flow model's numbers for that hour attached, summarised by program, band, spot, rig, bait and light window, and crossed against the report's flow-band and species-program blocks so each block of advice shows how many fish stand behind it. The format is in journal/README.md.

Two things only you can add. Clock times for when a rise reached you or a drop started and finished are the first real check the travel model has ever had; a line in the entry body is enough. And fish counts per block go into EVIDENCE in fishing_report.py by hand, from the catch report, so the page can say "Journal: 3 fish on record" instead of "no fish on record yet".

Occasionally

Task	Command	You get
Preview the fishing report for any flow or season	uv run python fishing_report.py --season fall --cfs 750	fishing_report.html, expanded
Check the report's gear against the tackle inventory	uv run python scripts/audit_gear_inventory.py	Drift findings, or "0 findings"; exit 1 on drift
Render the page for eight water scenarios	uv run python generate_test_html.py	white_hole_conditions_{scenario}.html and charts
Run the tests	uv run pytest	379 tests, offline

The gear audit reads ~/CodeProjects/new-croton-fishing/reference/tackle-inventory.md, the single inventory of record, and is skipped where that file is absent.

Running the page yourself

uv sync
playwright install chromium
uv run python main.py

That fetches the dam, the SWPA schedule and the USGS gauges live and writes white_hole_conditions.html and vertical_flow_chart.png into the repo root, the same files the Raspberry Pi commits every hour. Restore them with git checkout if the run was not meant to be committed. Production runs also append one row of predictions to predictions.csv, the log the travel model will eventually be checked against.

Where the numbers come from

• USACE hourly releases at Bull Shoals Dam, the flow the whole page is built on.
• SWPA hourly generation schedules, converted to flow, for what is coming.
• USGS gauges below the dam for water temperature and dissolved oxygen. There is no discharge gauge near White Hole, which is why the model is unverified.
• His Place Resort for the travel-time table and the fall-out rule of thumb.
• The research brief in research/WHITE_RIVER_RESEARCH_BRIEF.md for the fishing content, every claim tagged by confidence. Each block on the page names its sources.

License

Source code is MIT-licensed. The generated report content (the conditions page, chart, and fishing report) is © Brian Carroll, all rights reserved — see LICENSE.