A sensor is a device, module, machine, or subsystem that detects events or changes in its environment and collects them as a given set of observations.

Usually, sensors are physical devices that convert signals from one energy domain to an electrical do-main (and then to a digital domain).

In RCP, sensors represent commonly hydrometric devices located inside or near the geographic boundary of the context, usually near the re-spective river. A sensor collects multiple observations according to some frequency or in an ad-hoc way; each of these observations represents the measurement of some quantity (e.g., length, weight, velocity) according to some predefined metric (e.g., mm, cm, m, kg, g, m/s).

In RCP, each sensor element has a code, name, description, visibility, and status and is aligned with a sensor class (defined by the organisation manager), which defines the relevant observation’s properties.

Currently, the most common sensors for shallow-water solvers are of the class “Hydrometric Sensor”, which collects observations based on the properties “depth” and “discharge”.

For the current uses of HiSTAV, rainfall must be converted into discharge outside the RCP, through hydrological modelling. If other hy-drologic/hydrodynamic solvers are to be embedded in the RCP, sensors can be set up to input directly udometric data.