Making the Connection between Water Management Needs and Earth Observations
Abstract
This talk describes best practices and lessons learned by the NASA Western Water Applications Office (WWAO) to understand the management and information needs of water resource managers and other stakeholders in the western United States, and to address those needs through application of Earth Observations (EO).
Water management in the western U. S. is complex in large part because of policy and regulatory decisions made over a century ago. Water decisions are made by a mix of federal, state and municipal agencies or districts who have to manage water for a range of benefits, including water supply, flood control, agriculture, recreation, and ecosystems, while navigating regulatory requirements. Climate change and population growth only add to the challenges faced by mangers who rely on data from sparse in-situ networks, modeling frameworks, and historical records to manage multiple needs. Because of these challenges, there is a demand for Earth Observations to reduce uncertainties, improve models, and increase understanding of how much water is in the system, and where and when it is. To understand the challenges and address the demand, NASA's WWAO conducts needs assessments to understand how decisions are made and to determine the data and information needs of water managers with enough specificity to develop high level requirements and support applied science projects. This can be a challenge as there are many, diverse stakeholders, and although needs assessments are a common practice in other communities such as public health and international development, this is a relatively novel approach for application of EO. The WWAO employs a "river basin" approach to identify stakeholder needs and applies an assessment framework adapted from non-NASA communities to capture water management needs as use cases. This approach facilitates an understanding of management decision contexts, institutional and technical capacity for taking on new data, and science and information needs that can be addressed using EO.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMSY0020007G
- Keywords:
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- 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATION;
- 9399 General or miscellaneous;
- GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION;
- 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 6630 Workforce;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES