Publishing Bureau of Reclamation's water data: bridging communities and addressing context challenges
Abstract
The Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) is the largest wholesaler of water in the western United States, serving water to 31 million people and 20 percent of western irrigators, and generating enough hydropower to serve 3.5 million homes. Reclamation generates large volumes of water data describing reservoir operations, water deliveries, hydropower generation, environmental resources (e.g., water quality, species, habitats), and infrastructure assets. Reclamation faces challenges in helping public and private sector stakeholders easily find, understand, and retrieve Reclamation's water data for their various uses and decision making.
Since 2015, Reclamation has focused on improving its data publishing systems, responding to Administration, Department, and Reclamation leadership calls to serve data in more open ways, such as machine-readable modern formats and online portals offering web-services for automated data retrievals. Such "open data" service ideals have recently been codified via the 2019 OPEN Government Data Act (Public Law 115-435). Reclamation has responded by developing the Reclamation Water Information System (2017) and the successor, all-encompassing, Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE) that is being launched in Fall 2019. This presentation focuses on the RISE system, summarizing contents and features, and highlighting how development addresses two questions pertinent to this session: (1) How can silos between Reclamation's data producers, data scientists and data customers be broken down?; and, (2) How are contexts and applicability of Reclamation water data being communicated to RISE audiences?- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMPA34A..03B
- Keywords:
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- 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 4343 Preparedness and planning;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES;
- 6620 Science policy;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES