California Water Data Consortium
The idea is to help the state’s groundwater sustainability agencies “manage the transition to sustainable supplies,” according to the California Department of Water Resources (DWR).
DWR is working with the State Water Resources Control Board (Water Board), the Consortium and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to adapt and scale the groundwater accounting platform. Access to the platform will be free to qualified entities, and its use is voluntary.
The platform was a cooperative project involving EDF and Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District with technical support from Sitka Technology Group, Openet, WestWater Research, and Olsson Engineering and funding from the Water Foundation, among other supporters.
Tara Moran, the president and chief executive of the Consortium, is enthusiastic about the initiative.
“It really is a collaborative process, and it’s fantastic working with the state (water) board, the Department of Water Resources and the Environmental Defense Fund,” Moran told Techwire in an interview Wednesday. “We each bring strengths to this partnership, which is exciting.
“Part of the motivation here is that a lot of (water) agencies right now are signing contracts to build data management systems, and there are a lot of small agencies in California that simply can’t afford to do so,” Moran said. “Providing a water accounting system that they can use is absolutely part of the motivation here. The platform itself is open source, and that’s part of the overarching strategy in terms of helping to reduce costs for local agencies and the state long-term.”
Steven Springhorn, DWR’s acting deputy director for statewide groundwater management, explained the specifics of the project.
“Our goal is to help groundwater managers more easily and cost effectively track water use across their agencies and coordinate within and across basins to find the most effective approach for enabling sustainable groundwater management,” Springhorn said in the news release. “The accounting platform developed by EDF is a valuable tool for local decision making, and the Water Data Consortium is a natural fit for ensuring the platform meets local and state needs long-term.”
The platform “enables water managers and landowners to track water supplies and use, create water budgets, model scenarios, and trade allocations of water within a district or basin,” the DWR release said. “DWR and the Water Board are working with EDF and the Consortium to ensure that the platform is compatible with the online electronic portals that local agencies use to submit data to the state, such as DWR’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) Portal and the Water Board’s Groundwater Extraction Annual Reporting System (GEARS).
“Local water agencies will continue to have the option to develop and use other accounting and trading platforms,” DWR notes.
Moran said: “As the state transitions to really trying to embrace open and transparent water data — to the extent that we can, by building tools that are funded with state agency funds, using an open-source code base — it does provide the opportunity for a larger group to be involved, and it doesn’t necessitate proprietary software models going forward. But it still allows them (the agencies) to take that information and develop their own proprietary front end if they want.”
To aid water managers in budgeting and adapting to changes to supply, demand, hydrology, population, land use and climatic conditions, DWR has created a comprehensive Water Budget Handbook.
The California Water Commission is expected to begin public workshops on water trading this summer and distill conclusions from the public discussions by the end of the year. A public workshop on the open source accounting platform will be held from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. June 23 and registration is available online.
