Water Intelligence
Water Resources Data
Water Information Sharing and Analysis Center (WaterISAC)
Description: "Its mission is to keep drinking water and wastewater utility managers informed about potential risks to the nation's water infrastructure from contamination, terrorism and cyber threats. The mission has been expanded to help utilities respond to and recover from all hazards." Water industry professionals may subscribe to WaterISAC Pro. Tutorials are offered regularly to current and prospective subscribers.
Geographic Coverage: United States
USGS Real-Time Water Data for the Nation
Description: Surface water, streamflow, groundwater, and water quality data for the nation (approx. 1.5 million sites in all 50 states, District of Columbia, and territories. Real time and historic data. (National Water Information System, NWIS)
Source: United States. Geological Survey
Geographic Coverage: United States
CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS)
Description: "An internet-based system for sharing hydrologic data. It is comprised of databases and servers, connected through web services, to client applications, allowing for for the publication, discovery and access of data." (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science)
Geographic Coverage: United States
Water Data Library
Description: Hydrologic data: groundwater level data, water quality data, continuous data (such as surface water flow), and some climate data collected by DWR.
Source: California. Dept. of Water Resources
Geographic Coverage: California (Statewide)
Integrated Water Resources Information Systems (IWRIS)
Description: "IWRIS is a data management tool for water resources data. It is a web based GIS application that allows you to access, integrate, query, and visualize multiple sets of data. Some of the databases include DWR Water Data Library, California Data Exchange Center (CDEC), USGS streamflow, Local Groundwater Assistance Grants (AB303), and data from local agencies."
Source: California. Dept. of Water Resources
Geographic Coverage: California (Statewide)
California Environmental Data Exchange Network (CEDEN)
Description: A system designed to facilitate integration and sharing of water and environmental resources data of the State of California, such as historic bioaccumulation of toxic substances, sportfish contamination, stream pollution trends, and sediment toxicity.
Geographic Coverage: California (Statewide)
California Data Exchange Center (CDEC)
Description: Installs, maintains, and operates an extensive hydrologic data collection network including automatic snow reporting gages for the Cooperative Snow Surveys Program and precipitation and river stage sensors for flood forecasting.
Source: California. Dept. of Water Resources
Geographic Coverage: California (Statewide)
Frequently Requested Data (Santa Clara Valley Water District)
Description: Links to stream gauge data, groundwater elevation data, well records information, GIS data, flood maps, dam inundation maps, Board information, and other often asked-for information from SCVWD.
Source: Santa Clara Valley Water District
Geographic Coverage: Santa Clara County
Data Communication (Examples)
- Monthly water tracker is a monthly report that monitors
water supply trends and conditions, water use and conservation.
- Monthly water quality reports provide information
on the quality of source (untreated) water at each of the district's three water treatment plants, and the treated water which the
district delivers to water retailers in Santa Clara Valley.
- Groundwater monitoring reports contain
monthly groundwater conditions reports, and annual groundwater quality reports for evaluating current groundwater conditions and
land subsidence, optimizing recharge efforts, assessing groundwater storage, and supporting groundwater management efforts.
- Monitoring wells groundwater elevation data
Decision Support Processes (Examples)
Models and Tools
Water and Climate: Observations from Seattle
Description: How Seattle Public Utilities is downscaling global climate models to make projections for the region. (Kersnar, J. and P. Fleming, 2009)
Publication Date: Sep 21, 2009
Joint Front Range Climate Change Vulnerability Study
Description: "Incorporates a unified regional approach to assess changes in the timing and volume of hydrologic runoff that might be expected from several climate change scenarios for the years 2040 and 2070. Calibrates and implements two hydrologic models, the WEAP (Water Evaluation and Planning) model and the Sacramento Soil Moisture model. Also draws on historical streamflow data from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, regionally downscaled projections from the Bureau of Reclamation, and discussions with Western Water Assessment."
Source: Water Research Foundation
Publication Date: Feb 1, 2012
Water Erosion Prediction Project Climate Assessment Tool (WEPPCAT)
Description: Tool to model erosion with climate change. Keywords: WEPP CAT
Source: United States. Dept. of Agriculture
Publication Date: Jun 30, 2009
Strengthening the Scientific Understanding of Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Resources of the United States
Description: (Aug. 2011)
Source: United States. Dept. of the Interior
Publication Date: Oct 3, 2011
Options for Improving Climate Modeling to Assist Water Utility Planning for Climate Change
Description: Report "explains how climate models work, describes how some WUCA members have used climate models and downscaling to assess impacts on their systems and develop adaptation options, and makes seven initial recommendations for how climate modeling and downscaling techniques can be improved so that these tools and techniques can be more useful for the water sector. However, a key finding of the report is that for the next few years, maybe a decade or so, significant uncertainties will remain about how climate will change at the scale utilities make decisions.... In the short run, it is possible with existing technology, such as models and observations, to more completely understand the range of potential changes in climate."
Source: Water Utility Climate Alliance
Publication Date: Dec 9, 2009
Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate
Description: Concludes that the U.S. is unprepared for climate change and that government scientific agencies must organize to provide decision-support.
Source: National Academies
Publication Date: Mar 12, 2009
Guidelines for Constructing Climate Scenarios
Description: "Scientists and others from academia, government, and the private sector increasingly are using climate model outputs in research and decision support. For the most recent assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 18 global modeling centers contributed outputs from hundreds of simulations, coordinated through the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 (CMIP3), to the archive at the Program for Climate Model Diagnostics and Intercomparison (PCMDI; http://pcmdi3.llnl.gov) [Meehl et al., 2007]. Many users of climate model outputs prefer downscaled data--i.e., data at higher spatial resolution--to direct global climate model (GCM) outputs; downscaling can be statistical [e.g., Maurer et al., 2007] or dynamical [e.g., Mearns et al., 2009]. More than 800 users have obtained downscaled CMIP3 results from one such Web site alone (see http://gdo-dcp.ucllnl.org/downscaled_cmip3_projections/, described by Maurer et al. [2007])." (Mote, P., et al., 2011, Eos)
Publication Date: Aug 2, 2011
First National Expert and Stakeholder Workshop on Water Infrastructure Sustainability and Adaptation to Climate Change
Description: A wide range of perspectives by water experts on projecting climate change and planning for it
Source: United States. Environmental Protection Agency
Publication Date: Jan 7, 2009
Digital Shoreline Analysis System
Description: "Computer software that computes rate-of-change statistics from multiple historic shoreline positions residing in a geographic information system." (NOAA Digital Coast)
Source: United States. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Digital Coast Webinar Series
Description: Instructional webinars on using digital mapping data of coastal regions to perform risk assessments, land use planning, ecosystem management, and climate change preparedness. New webinars are offered monthly.
Source: United States. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Climate Resilience Evaluation & Awareness Tool (CREAT)
Description: "EPA has developed CREAT, a software tool to assist drinking water and wastewater utility owners and operators in understanding potential climate change threats and in assessing the related risks at their individual utilities. ... CREAT allows users to evaluate potential impacts of climate change on their utility and to evaluate adaptation options to address these impacts using both traditional risk assessment and scenario-based decision making. CREAT provides libraries of drinking water and wastewater utility assets (e.g., water resources, treatment plants, pump stations) that could be impacted by climate change, possible climate change-related threats (e.g., flooding, drought, water quality), and adaptive measures that can be implemented to reduce the impacts of climate change."
Source: United States. Environmental Protection Agency
Publication Date: Dec 17, 2010
Climate Resiliance Evaluation and Awareness Tool (CREAT) software
Description: A software tool to help water utilities understand risks and threats from climate change. After you click on this link, choose save or run to setup the software on your own computer. More information at http://water.epa.gov/infrastructure/watersecurity/climate/creat.cfm
Source: United States. Environmental Protection Agency
Climate Change Technical Briefings
Description: Among the topics in the two-page briefings: Climate models and scenarios, regional climate downscaling, climate vulnerability assessment, adaptation planning, water supply reliability, water demand impacts, water quality impacts, coastal zone impacts. Keywords: Technical briefing paper.
Source: Water Research Foundation
Publication Date: Nov 10, 2009
BASINS 4.0 Climate Assessment Tool (CAT): Supporting Documentation and User's Manual
Description: Modeling tool allows users to create climate change scenarios for watersheds. Works with EPA's BASINS modeling system. Keywords: BASINS CAT
Source: United States. Environmental Protection Agency
Publication Date: Jun 26, 2009
Assessment of Intraseasonal to Interannual Climate Prediction and Predictability
Description: "More accurate forecasts of climate conditions over time periods of weeks to a few years could help people plan agricultural activities, mitigate drought, and manage energy resources, amongst other activities; however, current forecast systems have limited ability on these time-scales. Models for such climate forecasts must take into account complex interactions among the ocean, atmosphere, and land surface. Such processes can be difficult to represent realistically. To improve the quality of forecasts, this book makes recommendations about the development of the tools used in forecasting and about specific research goals for improving understanding of sources of predictability. To improve the accessibility of these forecasts to decision-makers and researchers, this book also suggests best practices to improve how forecasts are made and disseminated."
Source: National Academies
Publication Date: Sep 14, 2010
Climate Change & Wanger Long-Term Impacts of DWR's Draft 2007 Reliability Report Imported Water Allocations to District UWMP 2005 Water Supply Projections: Technical Memorandum Draft
Description: Miguel Silva's projections of District water supply taking into account climate change and Delta pumping restrictions. For in-house use ONLY.
Source: Santa Clara Valley Water District
Publication Date: Jul 9, 2008
Improving Quantitative Precipitation Information for the San Francisco Bay Region
Description: White paper on how Bay Area officials can get the data they need for water supply and flood management planning.
Publication Date: Jan 11, 2011
Global Change and Extreme Hydrology: Testing Conventional Wisdom
Description: "The National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Hydrologic Sciences (COHS) convened a workshop, titled Global Change and Extreme Hydrologic Events: Testing Conventional Wisdom, to promote dialogue across the science and water resource management communities with respect to climate change and its links to extreme hydrologic events, specifically floods and droughts. The workshop's purpose was to probe the conventional wisdom that as the climate warms there will be an 'acceleration' of the hydrologic cycle that will translate into potentially more frequent and severe floods and droughts."
Source: National Academies
Publication Date: Aug 24, 2011
Climate Models: An Assessment of Strengths and Limitations
Description: (Final Report, Synthesis and Assessment Product 3.1) (SAP 3.1)
Source: United States. Climate Change Science Program
Publication Date: Jul 31, 2008
A simple technique for estimating an allowance for uncertain sea-level rise
Description: "Projections of climate change are inherently uncertain, leading to considerable debate over suitable allowances for future changes such as sea-level rise (an 'allowance' is, in this context, the amount by which something, such as the height of coastal infrastructure, needs to be altered to cope with climate change). Words such as 'plausible' and 'high-end' abound, with little objective or statistically valid support. It is firstly shown that, in cases in which extreme events are modified by an uncertain change in the average (e.g. flooding caused by a rise in mean sea level), it is preferable to base future allowances on estimates of the expected frequency of exceedances rather than on the probability of at least one exceedance. A simple method of determining a future sea-level rise allowance is then derived, based on the projected rise in mean sea level and its uncertainty, and on the variability of present tides and storm surges ('storm tides'). The method preserves the expected frequency of flooding events under a given projection of sea-level rise." (Hunter, J., 2011, Climatic Change)
Publication Date: Nov 23, 2011
A holistic approach to guide development of future climate scenarios for water-resource applications
Description: "Changes in climate are expected to have a substantial impact on water resources. Consequently, numerous hydrologists have studied the widely recognized challenge of using climate-change projections to address questions related to management of future water resources. Significant effort has been invested in formulating methods to overcome the difference in spatial scales between available future climate scenarios and water management needs. While numerous downscaling options exist, resource evaluation for the various approaches is rarely discussed -- most assessments are focused on evaluating the skill of different methodologies. In this study, a framework is described that water managers can use 1) to identify their climate-scenario needs and 2) to assess their financial, computing, time, and workforce resource limitations for climate-scenario development. This framework will enable water-resource managers to optimize the use of their available resources when developing future climate scenarios." (Puma, M. J., 2012, Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education)
Publication Date: Apr 3, 2012
Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP)
Description: "A user-friendly software tool that takes an integrated approach to water resources planning." Includes a water balance database, scenario generation tool, and policy analysis tool. There is a fee for downloading and licensing the software.
Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE)
Description: This site has case studies (including some water utilities), a virtual library (reports, etc.), directory, tools (such as modeling software), and community events.
Publication Date: Jul 4, 2010
Using Future Climate Projections to Support Water Resources Decision Making in California
Description: "This paper presents several advances in using future climate projection information in water resources planning, such as an improved understanding of how well selected climate models represent historical climate conditions and refined methodologies for representing streamflows, outdoor urban and agricultural water demands, and sea level rise in planning tools." Final: Aug. 2009
Source: California Climate Change Center
Publication Date: Aug 31, 2009
The Utility of Daily Large-Scale Climate Data in the Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on Daily Streamflow in California
Description: "Three statistical downscaling methods were applied to NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (used as a surrogate for
the best possible general circulation model), and the downscaled meteorology was used to drive a hydrologic model over California. The historic record was divided into an 'observed' period of 1950-1976 to provide the basis for downscaling, and a 'projected' period of 1977=-999 for assessing skill. The downscaling methods included a biascorrection/spatial downscaling method (BCSD), which relies solely on monthly large scale meteorology and resamples the historical record to obtain daily sequences, a constructed analogues approach (CA), which uses daily large-scale anomalies, and a hybrid method (BCCA) using a quantile-mapping bias correction on the large-scale data prior to the CA approach. At 11 sites we compared three simulated daily flow
statistics: streamflow timing, 3-day peak flow, and 7-day low flow. While all downscaling methods produced reasonable streamflow statistics at most locations, the BCCA method consistently outperformed the other methods, capturing the daily large-scale skill and translating it to simulated streamflows that more skillfully reproduced observationally-driven streamflows." (Maurer, E. P., et al., 2010, Hydrology and Earth Science Systems)
Publication Date: Jun 30, 2010
Modeling River Discharge Rates in California Watersheds
Description: (Potter, C., et al., 2010, Journal of Water and Climate Change)
Publication Date: Apr 14, 2010
Climate Change Technical Advisory Group
Description: Includes summaries of DWR models and scenarios for climate change.
Source: California. Dept. of Water Resources
Publication Date: Mar 30, 2012
CalAdapt - Visualizing Climate Change Risk and Adaptation Options in California
Description: Prototype modeling the effects of climate change, including climate data on a grid, sea level rise, snow pack projections, and wildfire frequency. Many of these applications work with Google Earth.
Source: California. Natural Resources Agency
Publication Date: Dec 2, 2009
Cal-Adapt
Description: Many tools show maps with projections of temperature, precipitation, snowpack, sea-level rise, and wildfires for local regions within California.
Source: California. Energy Commission
Publication Date: Jun 7, 2011
Developing and applying uncertain global climate change projections for regional water management planning
Description: "Climate change may impact water resources management conditions in difficult-to-predict ways. A key challenge for water managers is how to incorporate highly uncertain information about potential climate change from global models into local- and regional-scale water management models and tools to support local planning. This paper presents a new method for developing large ensembles of local daily weather that reflect a wide range of plausible future climate change scenarios while preserving many statistical properties of local historical weather patterns. This method is demonstrated by evaluating the possible impact of climate change on the Inland Empire Utilities Agency service area in southern California. The analysis shows that climate change could impact the region, increasing outdoor water demand by up to 10% by 2040, decreasing local water supply by up to 40% by 2040, and decreasing sustainable groundwater yields by up to 15% by 2040. The range of plausible climate projections suggests the need for the region to augment its long-range water management plans to reduce its vulnerability to climate change." (Groves, D., 2008, Water Resources Research)
Source: Rand Corporation
Publication Date: Dec 10, 2008
Links on these pages go to sites of interest to the staff of the Santa Clara Valley Water District. Listing a site on these pages does not constitute an endorsement by the District.
Created and maintained by Bob Teeter, District Librarian
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