Internet of Texas Water Data: Use Cases for Flood, Drought, and Surface Water – Groundwater Interactions

Date

2019-12

Authors

Rosen, Rudolph
Mace, Robert E.

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Abstract

Texas’ public and private companies, organizations, and agencies have collected water data for different purposes and at different scales for many years. These data are scattered across multiple platforms with different standards, often making important data sets inaccessible or incompatible. This leaves Texas’ decision makers, industries, landowners, and communities with significant amounts of data of limited use to support real-time decision making, development of opportunities for water security, or for modeling an accurate picture of Texas’ water future. To be useful in decision-making, water data must be open, transparent, and presented in ways that are relevant to the needs of decision makers. On April 17, 2018, the Connecting Texas Water Data Workshop (Rosen and Roberts 2018; Rosen et al. 2019) brought together experts representative of Texas’ water sectors to engage in the identification of critical water data needs and discuss the design of a data system that facilitates access to and use of public water data in Texas. Workshop participants identified “use cases” that list data gaps, needs, and uses for water data and answered questions on who needs data, what data do they need, in what form do they need the data, and what decisions need to be made about water in Texas. They described desires for future water data management and access. They articulated key attributes of a comprehensive, open access, public water data information system. Next, steps were described to include a subset of workshop participants meeting regularly in an advisory capacity to further define the goals of a Texas water data initiative, develop a model for the hub’s structure, characterize several use cases, and facilitate development of pilot projects to demonstrate the value of connected public water data for improved decision making. This report presents results of the first meetings of the advisory group, as well as results of the group’s first actions to define the goals of a Texas water data initiative and characterize its first use cases.

Description

Keywords

water data, groundwater interactions, flooding, drought, surface water

Citation

Rosen, R. A., & Mace, R. E. (2019). Internet of Texas water data: Use cases for flood, drought, and surface water - Groundwater interactions (Report No. 2019-10). Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.

Rights

Rights Holder

Rights License

Rights URI