Water Resources Web Map - Help - General Help

This site is still under development and may change between your visits. Although this site is fully operational, additional features are being added and certain behaviors may change.

Map Tools

The most common way to interact with the map is to use the toolbar to zoom in on an area, then select water rights to view their details. See the Map Tools help page for more information.

Map Search

A good way to zero in on an area or a set of water rights is to use the Map Search. The four kinds of map search let you search by water right, by location, by address matching, and by coordinates. For help using the map searches, see the Map Search help page.

Map Layers

You can change the appearance of the map by clicking the check boxes for individual layers. For more information, see the Map Layers help page.

Configuring your Computer

Adjusting your Monitor

This site is designed for a monitor display resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher. To view most pages including water right images at full size, you may have to scroll right and left, top and bottom unless your monitor display is set at 1024 x 768 or higher. In Internet Explorer, you can adjust the amount of text that is on your screen by selecting "View" and then "Text Size" from your browser's toolbar. Selecting a larger text size reduces the amount of text that will fit on your screen and selecting a smaller text size will fit more text on your screen at your current display resolution.

Optimal Browsing Requirements

For optimal viewing, use Internet Explorer version 7 (or higher) and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Any other browsing agents or versions are not recommended and are known not to support all features in this application. Optimal display resolution is 1024 x 768 or higher. Optimal browser text size for viewing the navigation bar and the tabs for Internet Explorer is medium or smaller. The Map Search Page displays best using a resolution of 1024 x 768. Other display settings may depreciate your viewing experience. To obtain the correct browser version or to change your display settings refer to your desktop support center. Free browser upgrades are available for Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Pop-up Blockers

This application creates new windows to open help pages and to view content from other sites (images of water right documents, links to the well log viewer, and links to stream gauge data). For this site to operate properly, you must enable pop-ups.

Internet Explorer 7

Although this web site does work with Internet Explorer 7, you do need to change some of the browser settings for all features to work. To view map coordinates and scale factor in the status bar, you must add fortress.wa.gov to your trusted sites and allow status bar scripts.

Enabling Javascript

Nearly all features of this site use javascript. You must enable javascript in your browser settings to use this site.

Troubleshooting

Response from previous request(s) not received.

This error occurs when you do something that requires the map to refresh before the map has finished responding to your last action. For example this will happen if you try to zoom in while the map is highlighting features or zoom in twice in a row. To avoid this problem please wait until the map has refreshed before you do something else.

Requested image is too big and cannot be created

This error occurs when your internet browser window is too large. The image drawn on your screen has a maximum file size and currently this restricts the image to about 1448x1448 pixels (or equivalent sizes). To avoid this this problem please reduce the size of your internet browser window. If the need arises, we will accomodate larger sizes in the future.

Use of Back Button

Every browser comes with a back button (left most button on your browser toolbar). It displays the last most current information, typically thought of as the previous page viewed. The state of this website does not support the back button. Using the back button may result in unpredictable and undesirable results.

Selections take a long time to execute

Although the area you select on the screen may only be a couple inches, it represents a very large area of land and contains a lot of information. You will see faster results if you zoom in to the area you wish to find features for than if you select a large area.

Unable to display MapService

If you receive this alert in response to a large selection, clear the selection and try selecting a smaller area. If needed, zoom into an area first. This error message occurs when the application times out trying to handle a request to our server. This most often happens when the user attempts too select a very large number of features on the map. If the problem persists please contact us and provide as much information as possible (time of day, browser name and version, operating system, etc).