Water is vital to California. Access to water and ecosystem information helps communities plan for the increasing demands caused by climate change, population growth, and other factors. This data assists in identifying areas and populations most at risk from drought, flooding, and water quality issues. To effectively manage California’s water resources amid significant changes, everyone – from the public to Tribes to local, state, and federal representatives – needs to have shared access to reliable, timely, and credible water and ecosystem data. So in 2016, the California Legislature passed the Open and Transparent Water Data Act, authored by Senator Dodd, which required state agencies to make water and ecosystem data available for widespread use.
The California Water Data Consortium (Consortium), established in 2019, is dedicated to supporting the implementation of the Act by state agencies. Its primary objective is to serve as a credible and trusted leader in open water data access and use in California. The Consortium recently hosted an online town hall in October to provide updates on ongoing projects and discuss the latest developments in water data management.
“We all know how important having good quality accessible ecological data is, whether we’re trying to figure out how much water is in the snowpack and how much water might run off in the spring from our Sierras or gauging, how much water is at a particular location in a stream, and how much water is available for the ecosystem and human uses, or how evapotranspiration data can help us better understand how much more efficiently we can manage applied water use,” said Martha Davis, member of the Consortium’s steering committee. “I think that a new piece of information for all of us is our climate-changing world, where the need for more useful, more usable water and ecological data could not be greater.”
“Senator Dodd’s vision was that California could create a more modern, integrated system, and one that would foster collaboration, not only within and across our state agencies, but with all California water data providers and users, including local governments and water agencies and nonprofits, academics, right down to individual community members,” she continued. “Ultimately, the state’s goal is to ensure that the state’s water and ecological data is not only useful but is actually used by all of us.”
The Consortium is governed by a nine-member board of directors representing various sectors. The Consortium works through a state partner agency team, a steering committee, and working groups that have been formed to oversee activities and project development. Throughout the town hall, the Consortium speakers emphasized the collaborative nature of their work and their many partnerships with state agencies, NGOs, consultants, community groups, academia, GSAs, industry experts, and others.
“We function as a unique public-private partnership and provide space for collaboration and engagement among state agencies and various parties with interest in water data,” said David Orth, board member and chair of the Consortium.
Founding CEO Tara Moran stepped down earlier this year, although she still serves as a senior advisor. The new CEO is Robyn Grimm, who spent seven years at the Environmental Defense Fund developing Open ET, which involved working with partners across government agencies, universities, private firms, and other NGOs to fill a critical data gap for water management and to ensure that the evapotranspiration data provided via Open ET was accessible and usable. Her prior experience has given her an appreciation of the importance of data and the possibilities open and reliable data enables in terms of innovation and collaborative solutions.
“I was delighted to learn how holistic the Consortium’s efforts are towards really realizing the vision of open, transparent, and usable water data for the state,” she said. “We don’t focus only on improvements within one part of that data life cycle; rather, we’re pursuing efforts to improve the entire system that drives the state’s data infrastructure, from that very first moment of a data point being collected through publication and then all the way around the data life cycle to eventual uses and applications.”
CURRENT PROJECTS
Groundwater data
The Consortium’s groundwater projects primarily focus on the open-source groundwater accounting platform and the co-development of common data reporting formats and best practices to streamline data reporting to the state.
Groundwater accounting platform
The groundwater accounting platform is an open-source accounting tool initially developed for the Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District. With funding from both the Department of Water Resources and the Bureau of Reclamation, the Consortium is scaling the tool to make it more broadly applicable to Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) and water districts across California. The goal is to provide local agencies, landowners, and growers with high-quality data necessary to better manage their water resources long-term under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).
“It really has been a huge success,” said Hannah Ake, Senior Program Manager. “We started development a few years ago with four pilot partners. We’ve successfully launched the platform, and have six geographies set up and using the tool. The great thing about the platform is that if I’m a landowner and I own land in multiple GSAs or multiple water districts, I only have to log into this tool to manage my parcels across all of those boundaries, as long as the GSAs have set up their policies inside the platform. So this really helps users to understand the role of accounting and data streams and policies that the GSAs are developing, and helps the GSAs to communicate about those policies to users.”
Groundwater pumpers in basins on probation at the State Water Board are required to file a groundwater extraction report with the State Water Board each year through the Board’s online Groundwater Extraction Annual Reporting System (GEARS). The Consortium has been actively engaged with the GEARS team to ensure that the groundwater accounting platform’s architecture, formats, and data standards pair as seamlessly as possible.
Groundwater data
The Consortium is working to develop groundwater data reporting formats with input from local agencies, state staff, and advisory groups. They have co-developed recommendations around data reporting formats for both well characteristics and groundwater elevation. They have also been working with advisory groups to compile various statutory requirements for data reporting programs in one place, ideally to help identify where redundancies exist and how future work might build on this foundation to help reduce redundancies.
“One huge opportunity that our advisory group has identified through this work is a need for unique and persistent uniform well identifiers, which would really help both state and local agencies to better manage wells and ideally to support water quality improvement efforts as well,” said Ms. Ake. “So we’re currently working on an outreach and engagement plan with our consultant team that we think will help to socialize some of the opportunities that we see in this space and then highlight the great work that has already been done by our technical advisory team.”
Telemetered Water Monitoring Project
California is challenged by not knowing exactly how much water is available and how much water is being used, when, and by whom until many months later. The state is already responding to this challenge with various legislation and policies that are working towards improving the accessibility and usability of data to support water decision-making.
One significant project is the State Water Board’s Updating Water Rights Data for California (UPWARD), which is working to improve the way the state collects and manages its water rights data and information. The emerging California Water Accounting, Tracking, and Reporting System (CalWATRS) will replace the current Electronic Water Rights Information Management System (eWRIMS).
The new CalWATRS system will have all the features of eWRIMS, plus include close-to or real-time data, so it will need to support the integration of data from telemetered water measurement devices. Telemetry is the automatic collection of data and the automatic transmission of that data to a centralized location via transmission pathways like cell towers or satellites. Telemetry directly provides real-time data to data systems, reducing labor delays and potential inaccuracies from water user reporting and remote monitoring.
Sonya Milonova, Senior Program Manager, noted that telemetry in California is already required for large diverters, and many organizations use telemetry to easily get data from remote locations without having to send staff there. “Now is the perfect opportunity to think about the expansion of telemetered water monitoring networks because of the state’s work on UPWARD, which will allow the system to have the capacity to ingest telemetered water monitoring data,” she said.
The State Water Board has created a Telemetry Research Unit (TRU), which is conducting technical studies of water telemetry monitoring. The California Water Data Consortium is working with the TRU to collect lessons learned, develop recommendations for a telemetry pilot project to be conducted by the TRU, and scale watershed-specific recommendations to develop statewide recommendations.
The TRU will be implementing a pilot project in the Russian River watershed. The Consortium is in the process of doing outreach to ensure that the design of the pilot is responsive to local needs and feedback and finalizing the recommendations for the pilot study, which include focusing on understanding the main water management challenges and data gaps in the watershed, and where telemetered water monitoring can address those challenges.
Some of the takeaways from the project so far include building trust in the network by paying more upfront for reliable equipment that’s installed and maintained by qualified professionals, doubling up with conventional methods when testing any emerging technology to show how it works, avoiding proprietary technology and overly prescriptive approaches, and working together to solve problems, which requires a transparent governance structure with clear decision-making framework.
Other projects and workshops
Other projects the Consortium is working on include the continued advancement of open data, the LIDAR Working Group, and the urban water data reporting project.
“We primarily host working groups and projects like this to provide a forum for cross-sector collaboration and to advance solutions to specific and timely water data challenges,” said Amanda Miller, Director of Operations & Finance. “These can evolve over time as priorities shift or as different interests come across our radar.”
Outreach and communications
The Consortium’s ongoing communications initiatives include the ‘Data for Lunch’ webinar series exploring the latest water-related data sets, technologies, and governance innovation and a quarterly newsletter sharing insights, news, and opportunities in open water data.
“As we engage in our strategic planning work, we’re also thinking about this more like a holistic approach to our communications and outreach,” said Alyssa Senturk, Senior Communications & Outreach Manager. “We’re looking to work with key partners to find and develop sticky stories that help us understand and visualize what management scenarios and questions people are attempting to solve with and in many cases without open water data on the ground and out in the field.”
“We really want to focus on the human element of our work and tell those stories because, at the end of the day, we’re all trying to help real people who feel frustrated, afraid, and anxious about the state of our climate and water, and those emotions are very meaningful to our work. So if you have a story or use case that you think might make a compelling impact narrative, please reach out to me.”
What’s next for the Consortium
CEO Robyn Grimm then shared some of her thoughts on the future work of the Consortium. There are seven categories of priority outcomes for the Consortium’s work: improved data governance, more efficient data publication and increased usability, building trust and collaboration around data, the streamlining of reporting requirements, broader public awareness of the value of this work, more equitable access to and greater benefits from existing data, and continuing to fill critical data gaps that still exist across the state.
The goals currently in their strategy include:
- Advance collaborative solutions to California’s most critical water data challenges.
- Engage a diversity of interested parties in our work, emphasizing traditionally underrepresented voices.
- Communicate the value of open water data in California.
- Continue to build the Consortium’s organizational structure.
“I’m really interested in taking a close look at these as we think about what’s next for this organization and the ways that we’re supporting all of you and the broader water data community,” said Ms. Grimm. “I want to be sure we’re really clear on what we think those most critical water data challenges actually are that are going to inform our work and programmatic priorities, and we’d really like to hear from all of you on this.”
The Consortium extends an invitation to get involved
Throughout the Town Hall, Consortium staff stated their appreciation for their many partnerships and those who are participating and providing input and direction for the Consortium’s work. The Consortium invites anyone interested in being involved to visit their website at cawaterdata.org to learn more about the California Water Data Consortium and find opportunities to engage.
