HW Summer 2017 Data by Water Education Colorado

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Data Illuminates New Solutions for Water

Denver CO 303-455-9589 Round Rock TX 512-736-6485

WATER RESOURCES ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT WATER INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRIAL WATER

Phoenix AZ 602-296-7903 Learn more about us: www.lrewater.com @LREWater

We believe that conservation solutions that make economic sense stand the test of time. Lasting change is achieved by creating new and unexpected partnerships among conservation, business and community interests to build durable solutions to big problems. We invest in organizations and programs that pursue conservation solutions for oceans and rivers while also recognizing the role these waters play in the livelihoods of those who live and work nearby.

DATA SUMMER 2017 WATER IS… SOCIAL • 14

Photos posted on social media during natural disasters offer a resilience-boosting perspective. CONNECTIVITY • 16

Water providers are using advanced metering to outfit smart homes. The end game: data-driven water conservation.

FEATURES

RECORDING • 19

Coloradans shore up at-risk data and shine light on data that has gone dark.

COLUMNS CURRENTS • 7

CFWE’s big night in celebration and support of water education and in tribute to its stewards. BY GREG HOBBS

PLANNING • 18

Water-use reporting informs statewide planning, but publicly sharing that data has been avoided, until now.

2017 President’s Reception

Opening the Flow of Water Data The digital landscape has placed high demand on open and accessible water data. As agencies push to keep up, this age of open data ushers in benefits for all. BY JOSHUA ZAFFOS

Driven by Data With more water data than ever, the challenge remains: How to integrate disparate sources of information for better and more nimble water management? BY NELSON HARVEY

Mapping Colorado’s Water Future

WATERMARKS • 8

Planning for Colorado’s water future demands a greater degree of transparency to accommodate voices across the state, so a Statewide Water Supply Initiative update angles to focus on open water data.

Notes from the Editor

BY GLORIA DICKIE

Notes from the Director

ABOVE: More than 30 hackathons, including Data Rescue Boulder and this event, which took place in Seattle, have popped up in cities across North America since the November 2016 election. Their focus? Harvesting and archiving scientific datasets from “at-risk” federal sites. Courtesy Seattle Data for Good/Data Rescue Seattle ON THE COVER: Agribotix FarmLens™ System Drones capture near-infrared sensor readings over fields in Colorado’s Eastern Plains. The data produces results like these, colored like a traffic light, with the densest or healthiest crops in green, fading through yellow to red and black, which indicates the least healthy areas. Farmers can use these results to maximize yields. Courtesy Agribotix/background image © Google, 2016

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CFWE

Mission in Motion

CREATING KNOWLEDGE

CFWE On Tour Tour season began in early-June this year, with our annual Climate and Colorado’s Water Future Workshop. During the climate workshop, 30 participants heard from expert speakers about Colorado’s climate, the projected effects of climate change on water in Colorado, and planning efforts for the future, followed by a tour of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Thank you to our wonderful speakers and sponsors: Colorado Water Conservation Board, Denver Water, University of Colorado’s Learn More About Climate, and Water Law: Patrick, Miller, Noto. Later in the month, our Annual Basin Tour visited the Southwest Basin and followed the length of the San Miguel River and part of the Dolores. Forty tour participants, including seven members of the legislative Water Resources Review Committee and several of their staff, spent two fantastic days in mid-June exploring this exceptional part of Colorado and learning about local Basin Implementation Plan priorities and water issues affecting all sectors. Our agenda was packed, and we couldn't have asked for a more robust set of informed speakers to share about the history, policies, collaborations and projects critical to water management in

Learn and engage with CFWE this fall at these exciting events:

Farm-to-Table Tour “Innovating for Viability” — Pueblo to Rocky Ford, Sept. 27 We’re partnering with the National Young Farmers Coalition and Colorado Ag Water Alliance to offer this one-day tour focused on innovative solutions for agricultural viability. Hear from speakers and visit operations focused on irrigation efficiency, soil health, adaptation for climate change, alternative transfer methods, water quality and more. Participants will have the opportunity to sample local fare at a farm-totable meal during the tour.

Tap-In Reverse Pitch Event “Cultivate & Produce” — Fort Collins Innosphere, Aug. 24 Join us at the second of three reverse pitch innovation challenges, where water’s end users pitch the innovation community on precise problems that need solving. Organized by the Colorado Water Conservation Board as a direct output of the Colorado Water Plan, Tap-In is turning the tables to spur innovation and investment by the private sector. The Cultivate & Produce event will focus on agriculture, food, brew and beverage. Visit tapinco.org for more information.

Regionalization Workshop “Considerations in Implementing Regional Water Solutions” — Colorado Springs, Oct. 24 This informative day-long workshop will explore the tradeoffs in regional water planning for achieving economies of scale, including a close examination of the opportunities, the hurdles, and the best approaches for success. Additional details and registration available soon at yourwatercolorado.org. Also, sign up for our email list to receive important news and events announcements and to stay on top of registration deadlines.

the area. A sincere thanks goes to them, and to our tour sponsors for providing funding support to help make the program possible: Southwestern Water Conservation District, Pueblo Board of Water Works, Colorado Water Conservation Board, Telluride Ski and Golf, Telluride Foundation, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, Colorado River District, Harris Water Engineering, San Miguel County, and the Town of Telluride.

Participants learned about all sectors of water users on CFWE's 2017 Southwest Basin Tour, here learning about water use for agriculture at the Indian Ridge Farm in Norwood. 4

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STRENGTHENING LEADERSHIP

Water Leadership in full swing!! The Colorado Foundation for Water Education’s 2017 Water Fluency and Water Leaders programs are in full swing and full of energetic people who are investing time to grow professionally in order to secure a better water future for Colorado. The 2017 programs will wrap up with final sessions in July and September, respectively, having built a stronger community of increasingly equipped water professionals and local leaders. In Water Fluency, a three-month water bootcamp, 35 participants are traveling the Colorado River corridor together to gain an in-depth understanding of water’s complex history, institutional framework and governance structure in Colorado. In the end, they will take that newfound knowledge back to their communities where they’ll be better equipped to make decisions on water-related issues. Water Leaders is an eight-month professional development course that is co-led by Cheryl Benedict of MORF Consulting. Each year 15 water professionals are accepted into this highly competitive program and

travel around the state building their leadership skills and knowledge of water. This year’s class will be CFWE’s 10th graduating class. As of September 15, when the 2017 program concludes, we will boast more than 140 Water Leader alumni leading the way in Colorado to a sustainable water future!

The 35 participants in CFWE's 2017 Water Fluency class spent their first two-day session in Glenwood Springs and Carbondale learning about water law and other structures guiding water management in Colorado. A field visit looking at municipal water management as well as stream management planning on the Crystal River was a highlight.

DEFINING VALUES

2017 Sustaining Colorado Watersheds Conference October 10–12, 2017 Avon, CO

“Coming Together—the Confluence of Science and Society” This annual conference, brought to you in partnership by the Colorado Foundation for Water Education, the Colorado Riparian Association and the Colorado Watershed Assembly, expands cooperation and collaboration throughout Colorado in natural resource conservation, protection, and enhancement by informing participants about new issues and innovative projects and through invaluable networking. Registration opens in July, and last year the conference sold out, so don’t wait! Register at www.coloradowater.org/scw-conference-2017

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How people see water

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On August 24 and again on October 4, Colorado water users will pitch their problems to entrepreneurs. Then, they’ll partner to drive innovation. Don't miss it.

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Colorado Foundation for Water Education Jayla Poppleton Executive Director Jennie Geurts Director of Operations Stephanie Scott Leadership and Education Program Manager Alicia Prescott Development Coordinator Caitlin Coleman Headwaters Editor and Communications Specialist Charles Chamberlin Headwaters Graphic Designer Paula Gillen Headwaters Photo Researcher BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Eric Hecox President Gregory J. Hobbs, Jr. Vice President Scott Lorenz Secretary Alan Matlosz Treasurer Gregg Ten Eyck Past President Rep. Jeni Arndt

s former senior editor of Headwaters, I’ve been writing letters to help kick off the magazine for the past eight years. Never, however, as executive director! I’ve passed the lead Headwaters torch to former associate editor Caitlin Coleman, who is extraordinarily capable of fulfilling that role for our organization and our audience. And so now I address you from a new vantage point. Leading an organization of statewide import, and running the number of programs we do with a limited budget and staff, can be fairly daunting. I truly believe that what we do is so important, we must continue raising the bar on the quality and amount of water education we provide. Not only does the number of people who need to know about water in Colorado grow every day, but the challenge of protecting and sustaining our water—and by extension everything we love about our state—does too. To be successful in our mission, we need to continually examine and refine our programming—and grow our audience. Beginning this fall, we will re-introduce CFWE as Water Education Colorado. We’ll use this new name as a launchpad to build a bigger tent that invites more people in. We’ll redefine ourselves as friendlier and less institutional for the layperson. Water doesn’t have to be intimidating. There’s always more to learn, and we all start somewhere. When people come hungry for quality information and programs, they’ll still find us right here, only even more equipped to help them step in. As we strive to be more accessible, we will design new entry points for people looking to get acquainted with water. That will include an overhaul of our website to provide a cutting edge platform for sharing relevant water information tailored for the spectrum of learners we serve. It will also mean meeting people where they’re at, through a series of informal, social water workshops and gatherings we will be organizing throughout the state. To accomplish our plans, we will continue to need you—our members, our partners, our readers—more than ever. Pick your level of participation and help us move forward. Let us hear your ideas for new ways of teaching Colorado about water. Watch for our new branding release this fall, and help point people our way. Together we can build a water-educated citizenry ready to tackle whatever lies ahead.

Rick Cables

Jayla Poppleton

Nick Colglazier

Executive Director

Lisa Darling Jorge Figueroa Greg Johnson Dan Luecke Mara MacKillop Kevin McBride Kate McIntire Reed Morris Lauren Ris Travis Robinson Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg Laura Spann Chris Treese

1750 Humboldt Suite 200 Denver, CO 80218 303-377-4433 • yourwatercolorado.org THE MISSION of the Colorado Foundation for Water Education is to promote increased understanding of water resource issues so Coloradans can make informed decisions. CFWE is a non-advocacy organization committed to providing educational opportunities that consider diverse perspectives and facilitate dialogue in order to advance the conversation. HEADWATERS magazine is published three times each year by the Colorado Foundation for Water Education. Its goals are to raise awareness of current water

FSC BUG HERE

issues, and to provide opportunities for engagement and further learning. THANK YOU to all who assisted in the development of this issue. Headwaters’ reputation for balance and accuracy in reporting is achieved through rigorous consultation with experts and an extensive peer review process, helping to make it Colorado’s leading publication on water. Copyright 2017 by the Colorado Foundation for Water Education. ISSN: 1546-0584

Reagan Waskom

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BEYOND THIS ISSUE

ood journalism relies on good stories that have solid data to back them up. We have some world-class data in Colorado and innovative people who are sharing it and building new tools to improve data usability and collection. And that’s a story that deserves to be told. In this issue of Headwaters magazine, our team of professional freelance journalists have laid the groundwork for you, as a reader, to better understand the advanced ways in which people across Colorado are using data and imagining new data-based solutions for more precise, flexible and planned water use. We look at the ways in which water data is shared, along with the push for more open data and the challenges that come with it. And, like all issues of Headwaters, we strive to tell stories from across the state that directly touch people in all sectors in order to equip Coloradans to make more informed decisions. Data and information underscore the way that many of us make even the simplest decisions, like which route to travel to avoid traffic. But open data goes beyond lifestyle. When data and records relate to something as critical as water and as widely relevant as government they become cornerstones of democracy. Freedom-of-information statutes like the federal Freedom of Information Act and the Colorado Open Records Act, while protecting privileged information of residents, also provide access to data, records and public meetings where decisions are made and funding is allocated. Responsible and active residents need information presented in a readily usable format. In May 2017, Senate Bill 40 passed to bring the Colorado Open Records Act into the digital age. This new legislation will require taxpayer-funded agencies to release documents in their digital form, if one exists, to make for more searchable and analyzable data than printed paper documents. When asked the cost of not updating the open-records law, Jeffrey Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition responded, “Consider what Alex Salkever wrote recently about how the Flint, Michigan, water crisis might have been prevented. If raw water testing results had been available in a machine-readable format, he contended, ‘any citizen could have run a quick analysis on the results and, with a modicum of education, judged for themselves whether something was amiss.’” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all Coloradans cared enough about water to look up water quality data for their watersheds of interest, get informed about water availability and diversion records, and participate in their basin roundtable meetings? That level of interest is what we, at the Colorado Foundation for Water Education, aspire to. Headwaters is just one tool we have at our disposal to advance the conversation around water. Dive in to this issue on data, and let’s work together to keep the flow of information going!

Caitlin Colema� Editor

KEEP READING Find digital content that relates to and goes beyond this issue’s data coverage on CFWE’s Your Water Colorado blog. Visit blog.yourwatercolorado.org and look for the following posts now and throughout the summer: • A Single Drop How climatologists use data to track precipitation, determine drought levels and understand longterm trends. • The Internet of Water Data sharing recommendations from the Aspen Institute Dialogue Series on Water Data are summed up. • Water Data and Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources Find out how DNR collects and uses water data for decision making through this Q&A. • More reporting on open water data, data visualization and advanced solutions with data. DATA ACCESS HOW-TO WEBINAR Join us in August to learn about and train to use Colorado’s Decision Support Systems, including a close look at DWR’s HydroBase Data Viewer, where anyone can access surface water conditions, gauge readings, structures and more. CONNECTING THE DROPS Tune in on air and online for Connecting the Drops radio. In partnership with Rocky Mountain Community Radio and thanks to support from CoBank, we offer segments that build on what you’re reading in Headwaters. This summer listen for stories on: • Advanced metering, the Internet of Things and water conservation, as explored in “Becoming Water Wise in Smart Homes” (page 16). • Quality water data, including the importance and challenges of quality control. HEADWATERS PULSE Our e-newsletter delivers the original water reporting you love, plus information on upcoming statewide events, new blog posts, and links to programming. Subscribe to stay connected at yourwatercolorado.org/register and check your inbox for a monthly issue. LEARN MORE AT WWW.YOURWATERCOLORADO.ORG

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Jayla Poppleton

A wonderful time was had by all at the Colorado Foundation for Water Education's 2017 President's Reception on May 12, where board president Eric Hecox welcomed everyone to celebrate CFWE’s 15-year history and support its ongoing work.

2017 PRESIDENT’S RECEPTION To celebrate the great leaders of Colorado water, the Colorado Foundation for Water Education annually recognizes two exemplary individuals who demonstrate above-and-beyond commitment to water resources stewardship and education. In 2017, we are proud to recognize Eric Kuhn of the Colorado River District with the Diane Hoppe Leadership Award for lifetime achievement in water education and Drew Beckwith of Western Resource Advocates with the Emerging Leader Award. The awards were presented during CFWE’s annual President's Reception on May 12 at the Denver Art Museum.

THEO STROOMER

CFWE WOULD LIKE TO THANK THESE SPONSORS FOR THEIR SUPPORT…

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Eric Kuhn Diane Hoppe Leadership Award Honoree

By Greg Hobbs ric Kuhn, “big thinker, deep thinker,” is how his colleague Jim Pokrandt describes him. Thirtysix years ago, in the spring of 1981, Kuhn moved from southern California to join the Colorado River District’s staff as assistant secretary engineer. As an electrical engineer, he served as a Navy submarine officer, earned a master’s in business administration from Pepperdine University, and worked with Bechtel Corporation’s power group on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. One of then-secretary engineer Rolly Fischer’s “greatest accomplishments” was hiring Kuhn, writes George Sibley in Water Wranglers: The 75-Year History of the Colorado River District. “Whatever Kuhn might have lacked in water experience, he more than made up with a quiet and quick creative intelligence.” Another district colleague, Chris Treese, credits him with “maintaining harmony” in a 15-county district “naturally divided between tourismdependent headwaters counties and more

traditional ranching and mining counties.” Harmony? Well, yes, maybe, for sure, and at times! The River District’s 15 board members are appointed by the boards of county commissioners representing a huge expanse of western Colorado, from west of the Divide to the Utah border, from the north slope of the San Juans to the Wyoming border. Differences are sure to arise given the changing needs and desires of sub-basins therein, but having common forums like the River District board is a good way to hash them out. In 1937, just for such a purpose, the Colorado General Assembly created the Colorado River Water Conservation District together with the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the Water Conservancy District Act. The River District’s statutory mission is to “safeguard for Colorado, all waters to which the state of Colorado is equitably entitled under the Colorado River Compact.” In my preface to Sibley’s book, I describe this legislative charge as “an unusual example of tucking the outside skin of the fruit into its core and exposing its flesh to potential consumers.” On becoming the River District’s general manager in 1996, succeeding Rolly Fischer, Kuhn assumed the neck-wrenching duty of keeping one eye on six downstream states and the Republic of Mexico, while keeping

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THEO STROOMER (2)

CFWE vice president Greg Hobbs (left) presents the 2017 Dianne Hoppe Leadership Award to Eric Kuhn.

his other eye roving up and down Colorado’s Front Range spotting opportunities to protect western Colorado water. When he’s at home in Glenwood Springs, he focuses both eyes on an early morning bike ride along the Roaring Fork River and the Colorado River. It’s at the conjunction of waters Kuhn works best. As a young River District engineer, he constantly hit the road to becoming an intrastate and interstate water diplomat. As a member of the Western Slope Advisory Council, Kuhn helped former Governor Richard Lamm’s Metropolitan Water Roundtable examine possible alternatives to Denver Water’s proposed transbasin diversion, Two Forks Dam and Reservoir. Parked in no-go throughout the 1980s, one of the project’s alternates was an exchange of water up the Blue River through the West Slope’s more senior Green Mountain Reservoir (1935 priority) to Denver’s junior Dillon Reservoir (1946 priority), for transport through Denver’s Robert’s Tunnel. After the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Two Forks veto in 1991, this exchange materialized as a separate project with construction of the River District’s Wolford Mountain Reservoir on Muddy Creek north of Kremmling, completed in 1996. Some of this water goes to protect the endangered Colorado River fish while some goes to Denver by exchange. Some is for West Slope use. Kuhn and former River District engineer Dave Merritt collaborated with Denver Water’s Manager Chips Barry, to get this joint-use project up and running. The key to the deal was keeping intact the senior downstream Shoshone hydroelectric water right in Glenwood Canyon (1902 priority), in the face of Denver’s multidecadal, unsuccessful federal court effort to assert a domestic preference for the water over West Slope uses. Denver Water and Northern Water’s Municipal Subdistrict—in mitigation for the Windy Gap Project at the junction of the Fraser River and the Colorado—contributed funds to Wolford Mountain Reservoir’s construction and subsequent operation. None of this was any more complicated than any other matter involving the Colorado River. Protecting Colorado’s water allocation under the 1922 Colorado River Compact requires an ongoing allColorado commitment to preserving Lake Powell’s water delivery equalizing function

with Lake Mead, while implementing the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. Not to be forgotten in this milieu of water governance and politics is the cooperation of environmental groups, the Colorado Water Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, the seven Colorado River Basin states, the Republic of Mexico, and the U.S. Congress. Healthyas-can-be riparian habitat up and down the Colorado River, as it runs from Rocky Mountain National Park to the Sea of Cortez through Lake Powell and Lake Mead, is a goal worth pursuing. But achieving this in the midst of wicked drought, like the one we’ve just seen, is daunting. Colorado’s new water plan, coordinated through the Colorado Water Conservation Board, nine local basin roundtables and a statewide Interbasin Compact Committee, aspires to many more collaborative agreements, like the Wolford Mountain agreement and the more recent Colorado River Cooperative Agreement that Denver Water, the River District, and a score of others have entered into. When planning future projects, failure to take into account the risk of even greater droughts risks the state’s future. This is why Kuhn rides his bike, gaining both a physical workout and thinking time. The Colorado River’s been good to him. He met his wife, Sue, in Glenwood Springs. They’ve raised their beloved daughters, Hallie and Kenzie, there. It’s a brainy, nuclear family composed of engineering, medical laboratory, bio-tech, climate change problem-solving geeks. n

Drew Beckwith Emerging Leader Award Honoree

By Greg Hobbs rew Beckwith, water policy manager for Western Resources Advocates, devotes himself to Colorado’s water conservation future. His particular focus is municipal water conservation and land use planning. A member of CFWE’s Water Leaders class of 2013, Drew helped shape the Citizen’s Guide to Water Conservation, Second Edition (2016). This guide explores a wide range of water-saving innovations for use in homes and cities, commerce and industry. Drew is a scholar, author and outdoors-

CFWE staff (left to right) Stephanie Scott, Jayla Poppleton, Jennie Geurts and Caitlin Coleman celebrated Emerging Leader honoree Drew Beckwith’s (second from left) accomplishments at the 2017 President’s Reception.

man with West-wide perspective and experience. Growing up in Oregon, he graduated from Colorado College, where his senior geology thesis took him to Alaskan glaciers for the study of landforms and sedimentology. Drew then went on to obtain a master’s degree in Environmental Science and Management from the University of California at Santa Barbara. In southern California, he collaborated on stormwater control and reduction strategies for two watersheds around the City of Santa Barbara. In Colorado, he dedicates his efforts to “healthy rivers and growing cities that have the water supply they need.” Achieving both of these are leading components of Colorado’s Water Plan. Drew is a frequent and articulate participant in water conservation workshops up and down Colorado’s Front Range. He cooperated with Colorado legislators to pass the 2016 rain barrel bill as a way to educate homeowners about the value of Colorado’s scarce water supply. He especially enjoys helping local land use planning and municipal water supply entities get to know and work closely with each other. For example, he has helped convene city council persons, city managers, planning staff, and water providers of Aurora, Arvada, Broomfield, Castle Rock, Commerce City, Lakewood, Parker, Thornton and Westminster. He sees wa-

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ter reuse, good landscaping choices, and private sector expertise woven together in the design of attractive water-conscious communities. The three-member team he leads for Western Resources Advocates is also assisting the Colorado River Basin states and the Bureau of Reclamation with implementation of water conservation savings and reuse measures throughout the basin. Drew is a skier, a rafter, and a volleyball player. His wife, Melissa, a ceramic artist, has her own graphic design business. They settled in Louisville to enjoy the life and views of a great small town with their two young children, Macy, who is six, and Miles, three. n

… AND OUR OTHER SPONSORS WHO HELPED MAKE THIS EVENT POSSIBLE:

Cheryl Benedict, Civil Design Group, CoBank, Colorado Water Institute, Colorado Water Resources and Power Development Authority, Ducks Unlimited, Environmental Defense Fund, George K. Baum & Company, Guaranty Bank, HDR Engineering Inc., Kogovsek and Associates, Northern Water, Pueblo Board of Water Works, South Metro Water Supply Authority, Special District Association, Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District, West Sage Water Consultants, White & Jankowski

Social > Connectivity > Planning > Recording

WATER IS DATA… While most data collected today is stored, processed and imaged digitally, older data is often traced to paper records. Although many state government files in Colorado have long been publicly available upon request under the Colorado Open Records Act, the person requesting files would have to pay for copying and might be required to travel to pick up those copies—that’s changing. New Colorado legislation that passed in May 2017, Senate Bill 40, will bring more records into the digital age. The new bill requires the keepers of “structured data” public records to provide accurate and searchable digital copies when requested.

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ADOBE STOCK

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Photos shared on social media during the 2013 flood on Colorado’s Front Range have helped researchers and engineers better understand hydrology and rebuild for resilience.

#NoFilterNeeded Disaster recovery and planning for a safer world, courtesy of social media data BY LYNNE WINTER

t started with a drop and after several days in September 2013, Boulder County was flooded with 17 inches of rain—the amount the city would expect to receive over the course of a year. Thousands of people and animals evacuated, roads were rendered impassable and homes were destroyed. Boulder came to a standstill. What didn’t stop were people taking pictures and posting them on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and Twitter. During and after natural disasters, research teams and first responders across the country stand by to cull data and push information out over social media with the aim of improving public safety. Social media data can be used both locally and nationally to communicate with the public, determine which areas are in need of immediate assistance, supplement remote sensing data, and improve reconstruction efforts by engineers.

In March 2016, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) launched an official initiative to monitor social media during disasters. Twenty-four-hour FEMA watch centers maintain uninterrupted “situational awareness,” providing partners with up-to-the-minute information during disasters. By monitoring social media for keywords, FEMA can better coordinate its responses and keep people safe. "We're not waiting until people are dialing 911 to get information. We can start getting information from disaster sites from the public telling us," says FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, speaking to the impact of social media on emergency management in a December 2015 FEMA video. Still, emergency responders remain wary as social media can spread misinformation— particularly when people are fearful. During the 2013 floods, reports of dam failure were quickly disseminated when people noticed water pouring from a dam’s spillways. The

spillways were working properly, but panicked reports forced emergency personnel to investigate, taking time and resources away from actual emergency situations. Social media data collected during the 2013 floods has been studied by researchers from both Penn State and the University of Colorado Boulder. At Penn State, researchers discovered that social media can supplement remote sensing data during extreme weather events. Historically, responders relied on remote sensing to identify flooded areas and determine where to launch rescue efforts, but satellite data is not always available in real time and may not accurately reflect what is happening on the ground. An algorithm examined 150,000 tweets from people in affected areas of Boulder, along with 22,000 photos from satellites, Twitter, Flickr and other sources. The analysis revealed that satellite imagery portrayed only minimal flooding, while social media posts documented impassable roads. Used together, satellite data and social media can complete the picture. Project EPIC (Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis), based in CU Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, has also examined social media data from the Boulder floods—in their case, to improve reconstruction efforts. Project EPIC studies social media during disasters to inform engineering and rebuilding, creating a safer built environment that can stand up to future events. Weather events damage structures and geography. When initial construction begins on a structure, engineers make mathematical estimates to determine the amount and types of stresses it should be able to withstand without incurring damage. After cataclysmic events, engineers gather onsite information that allows them to establish how well their calculations held up. This

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(LEFT TO RIGHT) @DRJONKEDSKI/INSTAGRAM, @ISTHE90S/TWITTER

Water is Social

(LEFT TO RIGHT) @BETOLINK/TWITTER, @PHOTOJMATTHEW/TWITTER, @FISHNETTE/TWITTER

(LEFT TO RIGHT) @DRJONKEDSKI/INSTAGRAM, @ISTHE90S/TWITTER

data provides the opportunity to improve future structural designs so that both lives and money are saved. When a post-disaster reconnaissance mission is finally conducted, often cleanup work has already begun and evidence of how structures and landscapes handled the disaster no longer exists or has been altered in a way that is no longer useful. Unfortunately, areas with significant damage are often unstable, dangerous and inaccessible during and immediately after a storm. However, there are still people who can document the damage. The residents who live in these weather-ravaged areas can take photos in the midst of extreme weather events—gathering information and sharing it via social media. Project EPIC, along with Dr. Shideh Dashti, assistant professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at CU Boulder, found that those social media posts can support post-disaster

Addressing Wicked Water Problems Environment

reconnaissance work, improve long-term structural integrity and safety, and offer new hints about hydrology and drainage. "Project EPIC recorded tweets during the floods," Dashti says. "[Our researchers] provided the EPIC team with keywords that are relevant to disaster reconnaissance and infrastructure performance, which allowed us to filter the tweets to a manageable number for further analysis." The study, co-authored by Dashti, collected Twitter data from September 11-20, 2013, and found that about 1 percent of the 212,672 unique tweets collected were valuable for post-disaster reconnaissance. What made certain tweets useful? They were encoded with latitude and longitude data, or geo-tagged and additionally supported with pictures, videos, or statements used to verify the location of the tweet. These 2,658 tweets were further filtered down to 40 tweets determined to

be the most relevant to reconnaissance activities because they revealed damage to "lifelines"—roads, bridges, water or sewage lines, among others. Pictures included with these tweets provided useful information to engineers, allowing them to identify the type and extent of damage found in an area so that reconstruction work could be planned. The study’s conclusion: Social media data can provide crucial information to successfully support engineering reconnaissance missions after extreme weather events. n TAKE THE NEXT STEP Go beyond the social networks and help first responders gain situational awareness by uploading photos during an emergency to the data reporter on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) app. Learn more at www.fema.gov/mobile-app.

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Water is Connectivity

Becoming Water Wise in Smart Homes BY CAITLIN COLEMAN

onnectivity has placed us solidly in a future that seemed like sci-fi fantasy 15 years ago. Today, our companions Siri and Alexa navigate, search the internet, and manage music playlists at the sound of our voice. Nest thermostats, too, have begun to learn our habits, tracking home energy use and automating climate control. Now imagine that next Nest-level of connection, not just to websites, but to the smart things around us, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT), and what that data could mean for household water use and conservation. “Alexa, how will my water bill look if I schedule my irrigation system to turn on an

hour earlier?” That kind of ability to monitor water use in real time and use instantly available predictive analytics for home water-related decisions is in the near future for some Coloradans. While the hammering and construction continue, the first homes are standing fresh, awaiting new residents at Sterling Ranch, the master-planned development adjacent to Chatfield Reservoir in Douglas County. Every one of those new houses is a smart home, equipped with a fiber network to enable connectivity; some basic connected metering; and a user interface, called Steward, accessible by phone, tablet or computer like any other app. For home or business owners in the community, Steward is the command center for

information about neighborhood events, home security systems, and utilities. In addition to finding data on electric and natural gas use, homeowners can open Steward to check specific water use data in real time and see how that use pattern, if continued, will be reflected on their next monthly water bill. “Knowing that I’m consuming 2,000 gallons of water is interesting but it’s meaningless,” says Marty Skolnick, Siemens’ account manager for the Sterling Ranch project. “But if it’s monetized and I know that it’s $128 a month, that becomes more valuable because I can relate to it.” Smart utility monitoring like this has been gaining popularity with water providers across Colorado. To keep them operational, utilities replace old water meters every 10 to 20 years, and are beginning to cycle in smarter meters, known as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). AMI enables two-way communication between a meter and the water provider so utilities can monitor their entire distribution systems hourly—providing powerful information that enables them to quickly spot or

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CAITLIN COLEMAN

Rene Herrera, technology integration officer at Siemens, stands in the company’s technology research lab in Littleton and demonstrates a mockup of Steward, the app that Sterling Ranch homeowners will be able to use to stay connected and receive real-time information about their water use.

prevent leaks, develop water conservation plans, and enforce drought restrictions. But AMI also creates the opportunity for households to interact with their own data. Fort Collins Utilities is among the many water providers that have upgraded to AMI with a goal of enhancing conservation data sharing. Through its online tool, Monitor My Use, Fort Collins water users can review their hourly usage, access conservation tips, and connect with utility personnel. They can also set alerts to receive texts or emails when they use more water than usual. Utility staff are also able to use that AMI data to analyze use patterns and make suggestions for efficiency measures without having to visit a household or do a full water use audit, bolstering rebate and efficiency programming. “Our conservation dream is to help interpret and present the data to customers in ways that help them reach their [water efficiency and financial] goals in ways we couldn’t before,” says Liesel Hans, water conservation manager with Fort Collins Utilities. “We’re in the early stages of dreaming and testing, but there is a wide world of possibilities.” At Sterling Ranch, residents have the opportunity to interact with a few more of those possibilities. Indoor and outdoor water use tracked monthly for billing purposes is the only information that leaves the house, says Brock Smethills, chief technology officer for Sterling Ranch. But there’s the potential for more. At closing, new homeowners can opt to share data, privately and in an anonymous randomized format, with researchers at Vanderbilt University in exchange for more detailed predictive analytics. For participating homeowners, Steward displays benchmarking data comparing a home’s water use today, this week, or this month, against some point in the past, like what it was a year ago, a month ago, or yesterday. It also compares a home’s water use to other similarly sized homes in the community. “Now [the data] becomes meaningful from a benchmark and measurement standpoint

floo-uhnt water fact

An April 2017 paper published in Global Market Insights predicts that the smart water metering market around the world will surpass $14 billion by 2024, with the U.S. market set to exceed $3 billion.

and it also has a little bit of a flavor of a competitive environment, right?” Skolnick says. “Assuming you want to be a good steward of utility usage, you’re going to pay attention.” A number of recent studies have found monthly benchmarking on utility bills led people to consume 3 to 15 percent less water. If water use data is compared between households, not just monthly but in real time, there’s no telling how much farther water consumption will drop—though Smethills hopes for a 20 percent reduction. Then there’s an even more precise level of data gathering and information, where all utility-consuming devices in a home, including every point of water use, will be connected and monitored—expanding the IoT in these houses. Through this data, Vanderbilt researchers hope to understand how residents use their homes and how they behave relative to utility consumption. The data could inform more user-friendly designs for future homes. The first 20 households that opt into this high-level monitoring study will be fully equipped, fee free, with monitors and sensors on a circuit-by-circuit level. While it may seem like a lot, this minute level of data can help the consumer understand the financial implications of their choices, such as how a change in irrigation scheduling or landscape design would affect their water bill. It’s yet to be seen if those predictive analytics will change water use consumption, but homeowners, whether motivated by stewardship or their bank balance, will have data at their fingertips to make informed decisions. The future will likely bring more predictive analytics to Sterling Ranch and beyond. “Eventually where we’d like to get is where homeowners will be able to say, ‘Here’s how much I’d like to spend on water’ and have the home manage around it, as opposed to the homeowner,” Smethills says. “If you look at home automation, that’s really where it needs to go in order to make sense.” For the rest of us, maybe this level of home automation isn’t so far off either. Almost everything in the Sterling Ranch technology integration room is retrofittable to an existing community or district. The technology is there, and perhaps the desire is too. Says Hans, “Data provides the indicator, how we present it creates the opportunity, and the customers choosing to make a difference is the magic.” n H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

AURORA WATER AwArd winning 2017 U.S. water Prize U.S. Water Alliance

2016 Excellence in water Treatment Binney wPF Partnership for Safe Water

2015 Platinum Awards for Exceptional Utility Performance AMWA

Excellence in Management Platinum Award NACWA

2015, 2013 Outstanding Treatment Plant griswold wPF RMSAWWA

2015, 2013, 2011, 2008 Outstanding Laboratory RMSAWWA

2011 Excellence in water Treatment griswold wPF Partnership for Safe Water

2011, 2009 1st Place - water Taste Test RMSAWWA

2008 Excellence in water Treatment wemlinger wPF Partnership for Safe Water 17

Water is Planning

Per-capita water use stats in Steamboat Springs (above) and other resort communities can be falsely boosted by visiting tourists only to fall flat during the off-season, making it difficult to compare against towns with consistent water demand.

BY JOSHUA ZAFFOS

ver the past decade, Western Resource Advocates (WRA) has produced numerous reports compiling and analyzing communities’ water use and conservation. Studies examining a dozen or more cities have offered valuable insight on the effectiveness and obstacles of various conservation measures and tools, but the supporting data hasn’t come easily. “Data collection is often the biggest part of those reports,” says Drew Beckwith, WRA’s water policy manager. “It can take months to get that kind of information out of one provider, and then to standardize and format it.” State lawmakers seemingly facilitated such water-data-driven research in 2010, through House Bill 1051. With the goal of collecting more data to improve state water planning, the legislation requires major water providers who sell 2,000 or more acre-feet of water per year, enough for about 4,000

families, to annually report water use and conservation programming to the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) through an online data portal. “The main idea was getting finer detail and more frequency in data collection so we could apply it to the statewide planning purposes,” says Kevin Reidy, CWCB’s water conservation technical specialist. Previously, the CWCB mostly relied on utilities’ water conservation plans, which water providers only have to update every seven years, to inform Colorado’s Water Plan, released in 2015, and the supporting Statewide Water Supply Initiative (SWSI). Since the 1051 program began compiling data in 2014, the state now gets annual snapshots of providers’ water use and conservation. Over time, the data should help managers understand municipal water use trends related to weather events, rate changes, and water shortages. After four years of reporting, Reidy says

the 1051 program is amassing datasets, although users are experiencing some gaps and issues, such as a lack of data from certain rural areas without large water providers. But conservation groups, industries, and tech developers have lamented one major gap: open, public access. Beckwith says the program should be a one-stop shop for collecting water-provider data for research and analysis by outside groups like WRA, but it hasn’t worked like that. For the past few years, CWCB has released 1051 data through formal open-records requests but did not publicly post the data online. The reluctance to do so has gone against the spirit of the legislation and government transparency, says Steve Malers, founder of the Fort Collins-based Open Water Foundation. Responding to such criticism, Reidy notes concerns on the other side. In particular, some providers have feared bad press and unfair criticism from media or analysts who

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NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES/FLICKR

Advancing Open-Access Reporting on Water Use

DATARESCUE BOSTON @ MIT/COURTESY SAUL TANNENBAUM/THE BOSTON INSTITUTE FOR NONPROFIT JOURNALISM

NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES/FLICKR

Water is Recording

might use the data to compare communities strictly on per-capita water use. That’s a problem since Colorado’s cities and towns have different industries, economies, and climates that can heavily influence such figures. For instance, a ski town may experience large bumps in water use from weekend hotel guests that can skew per-capita water use reporting versus a similarly sized town that doesn’t attract tourism. However, this April marked major progress: CWCB made 1051 data publicly available through the Water Efficiency Data Portal on its website. Beckwith and others laud the move toward improved transparency and see it as a sign that governments and utilities are getting more comfortable with sharing data with residents, ratepayers, and others. Still, users must receive permission—through login names and passwords—to view 1051 data, while other portals openly post datasets for direct access. The increased access, Malers says, will also enable data providers, users and managers to better evaluate CWCB grant programs’ effectiveness—allowing the agency and stakeholders to see whether state funding is being directed to where it has the greatest impact. It will also enable outside checks and balances as state water planning proceeds to identify projects deemed necessary based on current use and future water demand projections. One side benefit from the 1051 data reporting is that it led to another waterconserving effort by the state. The data revealed that many providers weren’t following American Water Works Association (AWWA) best practices to audit losses in their distribution systems. Water-loss management “can be a real water and money saver for providers when they do it in a comprehensive manner,” Reidy says. In response, Reidy helped organize a pilot run of workshops in 2015 to teach water providers about “water-loss accounting,” considered the most efficient and reliable approach to detect leaks. “[The 1051 data] got my gears moving,” Reidy says, and the pilot trainings revealed a need for continued training. As a result, on July 1, the CWCB’s Office of Water Conservation and Drought Planning received $1.1 million, a line item in House Bill 17-1248, to implement a full-scale statewide training program using the AWWA methodology. n

Data Rescue

Efforts to keep data from going dark pay dividends in understanding the present and learning from the past BY CAITLIN COLEMAN

n a late-February Saturday morning, more than 20 volunteers filled an upstairs classroom in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Wolf Law Building with gentle keyboard clicks, mouse clacks, and collaborative chatter about uploads, IP addresses, and large files. Their charge: data rescue. The event launched Data Rescue Boulder, one of more than 30 hackathons that have popped up in cities across the United States and Canada. Functioning as a member of the Data Refuge Project and coordinating with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), Data Rescue Boulder is focused on harvesting and archiving scientific datasets from “at-risk” federal sites. At-risk data is data that’s currently available but may be threatened or vulnerable to suddenly going missing or “dark.” In some cases data may be at risk as a result of cen-

sorship; in other situations there’s a looming threat that budget cuts could mean deprioritized and lost data storage. “Sometimes it’s neglect, sometimes it’s malfeasance,” says Dave Gallaher, who works for the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder and serves as chair of the Research Data Alliance, an international group focused on enabling open data sharing. “For whatever reason, that [at-risk] data is now not safe.” Data Rescue Boulder volunteers were driven by national politics and changes seen and tracked on federal websites. EDGI members monitor changes to federal agency websites on a daily basis and have sounded the alarm on deleted language around climate change, along with various rules, reports and datasets. In May 2017, the Washington Post reported that as of February 2017 there were 195,245 public datasets available on data.gov—that number dropped to 156,000 in late April before

At data rescue events like this one in Boston, volunteers worked to archive publicly accessible and potentially vulnerable scientific data and web pages. H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

rising to 192,648 the week of May 14. And though watchdogs are concerned about information being withheld from the public, experts say the decrease may reflect the consolidation of datasets, while federal officials say the disappearance of datasets was due to a glitch that happened during work on metadata. In their efforts at Data Rescue Boulder, volunteers targeted information compiled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institutes of Health, and others. Over the two weeks following the rescue event, volunteers collected and republished the entire 2.65 million StreamCat datasets on small U.S. streams and waterways, plus millions of other sets on climate, water, air quality, health and more, putting volunteers on track to create a refuge for more than 1 billion scientific records, according to Joan Saez, an executive at the Colorado data company Cloud BIRST, who spearheaded and sponsored the Boulder event. As of May 1, 2017, EDGI volunteers and members across the country “seeded” or marked 63,076 webpages for a webcrawler to copy the material on those pages and their subdomains. Although EDGI was newly started in November 2016, and this public rescue effort was especially massive, driven by fear that scientific data will be lost as a result of decisions made by the new administration, data archiving projects aren’t unusual. Whenever federal administration changes hands, libraries conduct end-ofterm harvests where they cooperate with 20

the Government Publishing Office to copy outgoing administration websites. At the same time, other folks like Gallaher keep a steady and constant focus on rescuing atrisk and dark data across the world. “All kinds of people have all kinds of data,” Gallaher says, including old at-risk data. “Things like weather records or streamflow gauge records from all over Africa. I’ve seen pictures of storage warehouses that are just full of paper records literally being chewed on by rats,” he says. Old British ship records, too, offer temperature, precipitation and barometric pressure data from more than 300 years ago, but the paper is disintegrating. The same is true of old film. And while other media may not disintegrate, some has been dumped because it was too expensive to store. Holding data for the sake of hoarding information isn’t helpful, but with historical records may come insights into problems we face today and a better ability to map out the future. For almost a decade Gallaher, alongside his team at NSIDC, has been shedding light on dark data. The team’s great victory thus far has been the recovery, reprocessing and digitizing of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) data from the Nimbus I, II and III missions, when Nimbus flew as a weather satellite in 1964, 1966 and 1969. Their data recovery effort, which extended the polar sea ice record back from 1979 to the 1960s, was recognized when the team won the 2016 International Data Rescue Award in Geosciences. An extended sea ice record means more accurate climate

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NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Nimbus III, photographed in 1967 at the Goddard Space Flight Center, flew in 1969 to collect meteorological data. Over the past decade, the National Snow and Ice Data Center recovered and digitized information from the Nimbus I, II, and III missions, using that data to extend the polar sea ice record.

modeling and a better understanding of how sea ice has changed over the past 50 years. Bringing this dark data to light wasn’t easy. After the Nimbus missions were complete, spools of the data along with reels of film containing hundreds of thousands of time-stamped images were boxed up. The information wasn’t lost, but it wasn’t easy to access—the data went dark. In 2009, when Gallaher heard that NASA scientists had successfully recovered high resolution infrared radiometer images from the Nimbus missions, he requested them. Gallaher found that the data was stored in boxes, the boxes were full of canisters, and each canister contained about 200 feet of film. None of it had been opened for at least 40 years. Using the data would mean scanning and looking at more than 250,000 individual frames. And there were other roadblocks. Gallaher’s team had to piece the timestamped images together with Nimbus orbital data that was stored by the North American Aerospace Defense Command to determine what the satellite was looking at. Then there were the clouds. Nimbus was designed to look at weather, so the team had to craft special techniques to interpret the images beyond the storm clouds, finding the darkest pixel in each photo to indicate ocean and ice, in order to mark the ice edge. Still, the team got it done. Now that the imagery is published and public, Gallaher is on to a new project looking at old Environmental Sciences Services Administration data with the hope that its operational weather satellites, which began taking daily snapshots of the earth in 1965, can fill in the Nimbus data gaps and evaluate how often drought occurred over the study period. With a more complete and continuous record, researchers will be able to make better connections between polar ice changes and shifts in climate and sea levels over time. Meanwhile, the Research Data Alliance is looking at the big questions of data sustainability like how to make and store data so it will last. Although the alliance has developed standards, there’s no perfect format or media guaranteed, or even likely, to remain relevant in another 10, 100 or 1,000 years. Regardless, it’s a question worth grappling with, Gallaher says. “It’s the basis of every science. If you lose your own historic data, what are you doing?” n

our decades ago, water managers and utilities employees didn’t have much in the way of data. Water metering to measure homes and buildings’ water use was neither required nor common. Water quality monitoring and sampling to safeguard drinking water and environmental health happened along just a small percentage of river miles in Colorado. It’s an era that seems incredibly ancient. Today Coloradans are digitally connected to everything and to each other. In this new time of big data and nearly incomprehensibly large datasets, every digital process produces and tracks data, while the web-enabled devices around us—from cell phones to smart thermostats—measure and transmit that information. When it comes to water, water providers, engineers, scientists, boaters and anglers can now collect and access all types of water data, whether to inform conservation plans and river management, or to figure out when to hit the whitewater or expect a big hatch. Water managers make decisions using massive computing power, the internet, software and applications, global positioning systems (GPS), geographic

BY JOSHUA ZAFFOS

HENRY REGES/COURTESY COCORAHS HQ

NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Opening the Flow of Water Data

H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

information systems (GIS) and digital maps, and seemingly boundless real-time and long-term datasets. From streamflows to flood risks to water use and water quality within communities and even households, data is now a powerful driver of decision making and water resources management at all levels. “All of these aspects of data management have been developing in the past 40 years to get us where we can use the data in a confident way,” says Jeff Tejral, Denver Water’s manager of conservation. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, more people expect more available and accessible data, including more

water data, and the tools and context to understand it. And many local, state and federal government agencies, along with public utilities, have made a point of publishing and sharing data and information for use by others. This refers to “open data”—datasets that are accessible, free or practically free, machine-readable (meaning software programs can recognize or process the data or text), and available for unrestricted use. Open water data is creating some daunting challenges for those agencies, as they cope with navigating a changing culture, controlling the quality of shared data, and interpreting masses of information—but it also brings important benefits.

PRECEDING PAGE Through the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) citizen scientists across the country use rain gauges and other tools to measure precipitation and log the data online. This data then populates a map used by meteorologists, hydrologists and the National Weather Service.

Opening toward transparency

“Open data equals good government,” says Steve Malers, founder of Open Water Foundation, a Fort Collins nonprofit open-source tech firm that specializes in water manage-

ment applications. By publishing the data they collect, agencies can demonstrate accountability and transparency and show they are wisely managing resources and meeting reporting requirements, he says. Plus, open water data platforms minimize agencies’ tendencies to “silo,” or to store but not share, their records with other agencies and the public. As a result, anyone can see, analyze and manipulate, and make decisions using the same data. Opening data can even help reveal errors or biases in data or policy. Not to mention, it can make financial sense: Organizations once stored records on physical discs and computers that staff would tediously search through upon receiving records requests, in order to manually print and share copies. Now, agencies can publish records and reports online where anyone can find, search, download, and use the information. It’s more user friendly for citizens and agency staff, while organizations can reduce the costs of handling those records requests.

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COURTESY EAGLE RIVER WATERSHED COUNCIL

Eagle River Watershed Council’s Kate Burchenal and Timm Paxson collect water samples from the Eagle River, downstream of the Eagle Mine, to test for water quality indicators and concentrations of various metals. This data, publicly accessible through the Colorado Data Sharing Network, helps the watershed council assess stream health and informs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund cleanup the mine.

The concept of open data isn’t new, but the internet and digital technology have astronomically increased the availability of data. In addition to the federal government’s Data.gov site, agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey with its Science Data Catalog, host open data portals or web services—interfaces that connect computers and datasets—that include hundreds of water quantity and quality datasets. The Colorado Information Marketplace (CIM), for example, is a state-level open-data website that provides a platform for agencies to share data and enables users to easily search datasets from dozens of government departments. Since the 1980s Colorado’s Division of Water Resources (DWR) has shared more than two dozen datasets through its HydroBase, blazing a path with its open data—that same data is now also shared via the CIM. Those datasets include spreadsheets and maps of well applications and permits, water rights transactions, groundwater levels, river calls, diversion records, and surface-water gauge measurements for streams and reservoirs all over Colorado. DWR also captures time-series data from the U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Colorado Department of Local Affairs, and other partners to integrate a variety of data with its own. That makes DWR “one of the biggest and most advanced users” of the state’s open-data site, says Jon Gottsegen, Colorado’s chief data officer who oversees the CIM, adding that the division also automates and frequently updates its records. “The data belongs to the citizens of Colorado and DWR has always shared it openly,” says John Rodgers, HydroBase coordinator.

floo-uhnt water fact

Open water data and data sharing has become important at a regional and federal level with regional initiatives such as the Water Data Exchange (WaDE) program, which formed so western states could share important water data with each other, federal agencies, and the public. Similarly, the Open Water Data Initiative works at the federal level, through the U.S. Geological Survey, to integrate fragmented water data into a connected national water data framework.

By accessing the Colorado Data Sharing Network, online users can find GIS maps with water quality data, monitoring locations, geospatial relationships and other datasets.

Sharing Water Quality Data

he Colorado Data Sharing Network is a remarkable statewide database that currently encompasses 70 watershed groups, small utilities, and others who regularly, and mostly voluntarily, collect water quality and chemistry data from local stream reaches. After 15 years, the network includes 3.3 million water quality results from 11,000 monitoring stations across Colorado, with data and providers growing exponentially in recent years. Statistical tools for datasets, Google Mapper and geographic information systems (GIS) maps and layers allow users to access and manipulate water quality data from the network, with other landuse, streamflow, and environmental data from the state Water Quality Control Division, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. All of that additional information allows managers to tell a more rounded story with water quality data, says Casey Davenhill, director of the Colorado Watershed Assembly. “The value of the Data Sharing Network is the history and the data that has been collected, and the support of the Colorado Water Quality Monitoring Council,” which oversees the network and provides training and resources, says Davenhill, whose organization coH E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

hosts the council. Through an agreement with the Water Quality Control Division, groups that submit records to the Data Sharing Network can also meet state [regulatory] requirements without having to re-share or reformat those records. Network partners have also become versed in the challenges of data governance. In some cases, state and federal databases may not be compatible with each other, making it difficult to compile or synthesize records, marking another issue the state advisory board tackles. Davenhill says the network is now seeking out partners that can develop applications using the massive records catalog and that can even offer the capacity to expand or host the program. For instance, Colorado State University’s One Water Solutions Institute has developed a GIS-based Watershed Rapid Assessment Program. Known as WRAP, the tool enables stormwater managers and others to evaluate and forecast river system conditions and the impacts of land-use changes on water quality and quantity. The Data Sharing Network’s records can be a valuable information layer within the application, and the organizations recently collaborated on a webinar. “That’s the type of alliance we see as being really useful to us,” says Davenhill. — By Joshua Zaffos 23

Although technology has advanced, and DWR continues to add new stream gauges, the agency has been collecting and sharing many of the same datasets for decades while working to increase accessibility. The latest effort? DWR’s data-services site, Colorado’s Decision Support Systems (CDSS), which enables users to retrieve data, do digital mapping, water modeling, and more, will be renovated in 2017 to increase functionality. Not surprisingly, the great migration to open data has come with challenges. Some utility managers remain reluctant to open24

ly publish data, citing concerns spurred by past experiences when shared data led to negative attention or was misinterpreted or “weaponized” by another organization or a media report. In other cases, water managers worry that errors or discrepancies in datasets mean they’re not worth sharing. Regardless, it’s time consuming to digitize records and maintain datasets. “Over the years, a culture of not being overly public has evolved in water utilities and management agencies,” says Kathy King, a principal with Boulder-based Redstone Strategy Group working with the

Water Funder Initiative, a foundationdriven program to identify priorities and solutions to Western water challenges. “That runs counter to this idea that data are an asset and something you can use to tell your story and communicate with the public.” In speaking with water managers, researchers, industry leaders, and environmentalists for the Water Funder Initiative-sponsored Aspen Dialogue Series, King says many leaders recognize agencies and networks now collect lots of data and even make them

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CONTINUED ON PAGE 26

PAULA GILLEN

Steve Malers, founder of the Open Water Foundation, works from his Fort Collins office to provide open source software and improve open data sharing and visualization across Colorado.

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Grades for two of the four zones covered in the Poudre River Report Card issued in 2016

Data Storytelling Making the Grade: the Poudre River Report Card

diverse group of stakeholders are invested in northern Colorado’s Cache la Poudre River—some with seemingly conflicting interests. When Jennifer Shanahan, watershed planner for the City of Fort Collins, set out to create the “State of the Poudre” report card and overall health assessment, she knew it would be no easy task. The full state of the river assessment drew from hydrological, chemical, biological and geomorphic data to create a detailed picture of the river's health. The amount of data going into the assessment made for a truly comprehensive project—but it also made the process of sharing information more complicated. For a more accessible version of the report, the city created an online mapping tool and the Poudre River report card—a printed summary, distributed to stakeholders collaborating on river management. All three were released in May 2017. As the name implies, information in the report card is conveyed through grades—A, B, C, D and F. There is tremendous variability in

the river system, however, and there was a risk that important information would be lost in the summary. Inspiration for a solution came from the University of Maryland's various ecosystem report cards, which use color-coded symbols to communicate data. The color-coding is intuitive, with green for an "A" grade and red for an "F." Inner circles of a color wheel list the overall grade and corresponding color, and a segmented outer circle lists color-coded grades for specific areas. "It really allows us to tell the whole story," says Shanahan. The assessment and report card will convey a picture of today’s river health compared to conditions needed for a healthy river. One goal is to foster communication between the Poudre River's diverse stakeholders as they discuss the river's future, Shanahan says. "When you have a common perspective, it allows people to have a better dialogue." Find the report card at www.fcgov. com/poudrereportcard. — By Sarah Harvey

H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

In April, the Colorado Water Trust, the nonprofit that works with Colorado’s Instream Flow Program to restore streamflows, launched a real-time online dashboard to show how much water its projects are putting back in rivers and streams. The dashboard features an aerial map of Colorado with points that are shaded to correspond with specific projects and associated flow data. "We wanted to find a simple, immersive, interactive tool to display our project data to stakeholders," says Mickey O'Hara, water resources engineer for the Colorado Water Trust. A chart shows how much flow was restored by each project on any given day, with a link to the full story on the project. The dashboard displays an incredible amount of detail: Viewers can zoom all the way in on the map to see projects happening in or near their own backyards with real-time updates. Find it at www. coloradowatertrust.org/impact.

E. Coli’s Storyline The Denver Metro Water Quality Assessment Tool teaches a variety of diverse stakeholders about E. coli in the Denver metro area. The tool, developed by Leonard Rice Engineers, is the creation of the South Platte River Urban Waters Partnership’s water quality workgroup. The tool includes a data explorer, map and storyline, which allows for an interactive experience. Using the E. coli storyline is like paging through a book that provides a broad overview about the bacteria, with information becoming more detailed the deeper a viewer dives. "What we really tried to do with this is provide some context for users that might not be super familiar with water quality data," says Ben Tyler, lead developer of the tool at Leonard Rice. Ultimately, the Urban Waters Partnership hopes the tool will be equally useful to a concerned citizen, a policy maker, a teacher or a student. And there’s more to come: the E. coli storyboard is just phase one of a larger project. Phase two will add additional water quality storylines to the landing page, to include information about pharmaceuticals, nutrients and total dissolved solids. Find the dashboard at thewaterconnection.org/wq_tool. 25

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24

available but that doesn’t always mean datasets are usable or readily accessible by others. “It’s not so much that the data doesn’t exist,” King says, “but that it’s isolated and not shared and integrated in a way that they can always be transformed into information for decision making.” “Organizations tend to publish data in a form that is consistent with their mission and [regulatory] requirements,” adds Malers. “This means connections to other datasets may not be obvious, and does not make it easy for third parties to understand or use the data.” This disjointedness can also complicate cooperative research or management, such as Colorado’s regional or statewide river planning initiatives that span jurisdictions, when entities use different data parameters or categories. Gottsegen and the CIM are now focused on ways to manage and regulate data 26

sharing and to establish standards to increase data quality control and accessibility, otherwise known as “data governance.” Colorado’s Government Data Advisory Board, chaired by Gottsegen, includes state agency representatives to study and determine practices and protocols for data compatibility and interoperability, meaning datasets can be readily used and read by others. The federal Open Water Data Initiative represents a similar effort to coordinate data exchange among federal agencies. “Often, the organizational problems are a lot stickier than the technology,” Gottsegen says. “It is really about getting people together to say, ‘These are what the needs are and here’s how we’re going to solve that problem,’ and to think a little differently.” Advisory panels, like the state’s, can partly address that challenge by publishing more and more usable data including accompanying metadata, or files that describe

datasets’ creators, origins, and purpose, and that explain their various fields or columns. Metadata enables users to more quickly and effectively determine data quality and to make sense of the datasets they are attached to. It also reduces the risks of misinterpretation. However, some records managers worry that sharing metadata can also inadvertently give users access to sensitive or confidential information. The state data advisory board is also working to resolve tricky data management questions, such as determining what is an authoritative dataset when two or more agencies submit similar but conflicting records or when is a record considered obsolete and ready to be removed from the site in order to narrow down search results. “What we really need to do is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the queries done through the site,” Gottsegen says. That doesn’t mean a user can already

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COURTESY COAGMET

Colorado Agricultural Meteorological Network (COAgMet) stations, like this one outside of Salida, collect and map data—temperature, humidity, wind, solar radiation, precipitation and soil temperature—in agricultural areas across the state.

find and utilize every Colorado water record through the CIM, but Gottsegen says improving data governance should lead to greater usage. “We need to get to the point where we’ve got data staged and managed well so people can do good analytics.” Malers and the Open Water Foundation are among software and app developers that are already putting data to use. For example, the Open Water Foundation developed a web-accessible tool for the Colorado Water Conservation Board that uses National Snow and Ice Data Center historical and current snowpack measurements from river basins across Colorado to estimate the liquid water supply contained within mountain snowpack. The system, still in production, will enable water providers to easily monitor snowpack conditions and inform their supply decisions. In terms of the data package, Malers says, “We are trying to set a standard for collaboration and transparency in data, process, and tools.” A recently released report from the Aspen Dialogue Series and Water Funder Initiative concludes that sharing and opening datasets should also be a priority—with an understanding that agreements on data quality and interoperability are developing through data-governance programs. “We want to encourage data producers and water agencies to put data out there without too much concern for the quality, recognizing that quality can improve over time and that sunshine is the best disinfectant,” says King. “By getting it out there and getting it used, we can get a better sense of where the needs are and also where data quality really matters.”

Visualization and interpretation That attention toward the needs of a wide range of potential data users—from realtors to researchers, anglers and oil and gas companies—also underscores an overarching task for agencies and data entrepreneurs. From the days of sparse water data and frustrating records searches, now is a time of data overload. Malers, King, Tejral and others say collecting and sharing data isn’t enough; organizations now face the work of turning data into information that most people can make sense of. That comes with another challenge: funding platforms that allow people to use and interpret data. Many agencies have a government mandate to collect and share water data, but they lack the funding and sometimes the expertise to create usable data plat

Colorado's Open Water Data Platforms Agencies and entities in Colorado strive to share water data on publicly accessible platforms. Here are just a few places to dive in: •

The Colorado Information Marketplace: The state’s platform for all Colorado data. data.colorado.gov

•

Colorado’s Decision Support Systems: A water management system developed by the Colorado Water Conservation Board and Colorado Division of Water Resources. cdss.state.co.us

•

HydroBase: The Colorado Division of Water Resources water data and information site including streamflows, lake levels, water rights and diversion records. water.state.co.us/DataMaps

•

The Colorado Data Sharing Network: A water quality database providing a sharing and data management resource for entities across Colorado. coloradowaterdata.org

•

Water Efficiency Data Portal: A database of the water use data that the Colorado Water Conservation Board collects from water providers across the state. cowaterefficiency.com

forms. That leaves a niche for nonprofits like the Open Water Foundation and private enterprises, such as consulting firms, which develop customized data viewers. Water Sage, one such business, offers a massive portal that integrates water and land data and displays it through maps, graphs or other visuals for easy access and decision making. “We saw the need for there to be someone out there reliably aggregating data and making it accessible,” says Spencer Williams, Water Sage’s business development manager. “We’re focused on ways to make that data discoverable and usable for technical and non-technical users.” Water Sage automates data retrieval and aggregation, culling from state agency data sources, and delivers it, through its platform, to subscribers, who include water resources managers, conservancy districts, land management companies and others. Subscribers pay $6,000 for a year-long subscription. While agencies like DWR provide the pure data and some interpretation, they often are not able to invest in building the customized, value-added platforms that individuals and entities across the state seek. Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District, says her district signed up for Water Sage’s services to help manage its Rio Grande augmentation program, which ensures regional H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

well pumping doesn’t harm other users’ water rights. Rather than searching county assessors’ records, state water datasets, and Google Maps to compile information, Water Sage does the work for Dutton. “It’s data that is publicly available,” Dutton says, “but we really appreciate that Water Sage puts all that data in one snazzy, useful format.” “This idea of having data is really important, but we still live in the Information Age, not the Data Age,” adds Tejral. “Data alone overwhelms people.” So, if a utility, agency or independent software developer can compile data and also synthesize it with digital maps and other datasets, from water use to assessor’s records, “you are building a story of what’s going on and putting context around it for a customer and decision makers,” Tejral says. “That’s really important.” n Joshua Zaffos writes on the environment from Fort Collins, Colorado. Follow him via Twitter @jzaffos. TAKE THE NEXT STEP Learn from the Aspen Institute Dialogue Series on Water Data in a May 2017 report, which recommends a policy framework to overcome barriers and strengthen water data sharing efforts. Find it at www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/internet-of-water. 27

Growers use unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with imaging sensors to collect data on crop production, soil moisture, and other measures. 28

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DRIVEN BY DATA We’re getting better at tracking and altering flows on the fly. What does that mean for water management?

LEFT: COURTESY PRECISIONHAWK; RIGHT: PAULA GILLEN

n an unseasonably warm day in February, To Smith, the difference between these two Jason Smith stands in a cramped shack devices amounts to hundreds of hours of time in the parking lot of the Coors Brewing saved per year. When he started as a water comCompany in Golden, Colorado, examining two inmissioner in Greeley in 2006, he spent countless struments on the table in front of him. The shack hours each week traveling to remote stream gaugis just feet from the banks of Clear Creek, the es, manually reviewing chart recorder readings stream Smith administers as water commissionand transferring them to computer spreadsheets. er for District 7 of the South Platte Basin. Clear Today, he simply wakes up and logs on to his comCreek flows from the Eisenhower puter at home, where he finds Tunnel near the Continental Didata from 44 gauges streaming vide all the way to the confluence into a spreadsheet that uses of Interstate 70 and Interstate river levels to determine which 25 in Denver. Along with Coors, water rights are in priority that the creek’s major water users inday. Even when he’s out in the clude a smattering of agricultural field, he can view every gauge producers and cities like Golden, remotely from the comfort of his Lakewood, Thornton, Northglenn pickup truck, using a tablet and a and Arvada. mobile Wi-Fi hotspot. Both instruments in front of “Before, I had to wake up at Smith are water gauges, and by 4:30, drive an hour and a half the looks of them they could have or two hours in the morning, go been produced within a decade physically look at every gauge, of each other. Yet when it comes drive home, look at my water to efficiency, the two devices are rights priority sheet to deterlight-years apart. On the left is mine what everyone could take a chart recorder, which uses an Jason Smith, water commissioner for District that day, and then start calling inked needle connected to a float 7 of the South Platte Basin, checks a stream people and telling them what in a stilling well below to record gauge on Clear Creek. Smith lowers a drop to divert,” says Smith, a sturdily changes in the creek’s water level weight into the water to ground truth the built 38-year-old with a thick on a piece of graph paper. Power- remote reading he receives by computer. beard who wears Oakley suning it on requires winding a knob glasses, jeans and work boots. on the front, and although this particular recorder is “What used to take me two and a half hours, I can out of commission, it has been kept in place for posnow do in 15 minutes.” terity. On the right, by contrast, is a Sutron data logOver the last decade, as remote sensing, wireger, a small blue metal box that takes digital water less transmission technology, and computer level readings every 15 minutes from the float in the modeling has improved, it has become easier water beneath it and transmits those to a modem and cheaper than ever to monitor and even almounted on the wall. The modem beams readings ter streamflows in near real time. Smith’s story out once an hour over the cellular network, and they is a clear example: With remote stream gauges are picked up on a state database viewable by anythat transmit data to online databases, busy waone with an internet connection. ter commissioners can administer rivers more

BY NELSON HARVEY H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

accurately, quickly spotting shortages or excesses and moving to address them. Yet the advances go far beyond stream gauging. Complex modeling tools allow those same commissioners to better account for unseen forces like groundwater depletion and accretion, preventing injury to senior water users and allowing excess water to be traded quickly. With online data management tools, members of multi-partner water projects like the Water Infrastructure and Supply Efficiency Partnership (WISE) south of Denver can divvy up shared water supplies in a matter of hours. And images captured from satellites, drones or airplanes and verified with remote sensors let farmers indirectly gauge the consumptive use of their crops, providing valuable data for future water sharing agreements. Today, these tools are in use on scattered stretches of river across Colorado. Expanding their use throughout entire river basins could improve water management and provide the foundation for nimbler water trading markets of the future, which many say are needed to cope with growing scarcity. Yet doing so will require navigating a raft of challenges, from scarce funding and disparate data collection techniques to cultural concerns about data sharing and the generally decentralized nature of water management in the West.

The dashboard approach to water management When Jason Smith took over as water commissioner on Clear Creek in 2014, he inherited a stream with just two gauges equipped with telemetry, which enables the transfer of remotely collected data over satellite, radio or Wi-Fi networks. One gauge was near the top of the creek, the other was near the bottom, and administering the more than 40 diversions in between required visiting and monitoring each headgate in person. Smith knew the cost of remotely monitoring flows was falling. A plan allowing a data logging machine to transmit over the cellular network costs less than $10 per month, and open source software has lowered the cost of building databases and online dashboards to display remotely collected water data. In 2015, Smith used $131,000 in Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) grant money to equip 44 stream gauges on Clear Creek with telemetry.

“

What’s changed over the last 10 years and even five years is the accessibility of data in near real time.”

MARK MITISEK, Leonard Rice Engineers

Using the CWCB funds and working evenings and weekends, Smith, his deputy Don Baggus, and the Colorado Division of Water Resources’ South Platte River Operations and Compact Coordinator Brent Schantz dug holes, poured concrete, and rigged up solar panels and cellular modems up and down Clear Creek. It took seven months, but when they were done, nearly all of the creek’s stream gauges were accessible in near real time on the internet. Gauge readings are updated every hour and listed on the Colorado Division of Water Resources website. They’re also accessible through Colorado’s Decision Support System’s HydroBase Data Viewer, alongside data from other gauges operated by the state, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and individual water providers. In working to modernize the gauges on Clear Creek, Smith was driven by the fact that without remote streamflow monitors, it took hours to respond to shortages or to redistribute water if there was excess due to a rain event. Whether a water user was diverting more than his or her share or foregoing diversions entirely, Smith needed to be able to react more quickly to get water to those in priority on a given day. “Everything comes down to money,” Smith says. “Water is valuable, and if I let a drop of water go by that my users are entitled to just because I didn’t see it, that’s my fault.” These days, Smith spends less time in the truck visiting gauges, although he still stops by each gauge once a week to make sure that it’s properly calibrated and that no snakes, mice or debris have touched a

floo-uhnt water fact

Privacy concerns make some people hesitant about open water data. While regulations govern personally identifiable information and proprietary data, some water data may need to be aggregated or blurred for anonymity.

float and altered its readings. Instead, he prioritizes visiting long-neglected diversion structures on the creek or getting to know water users he hasn’t met before. And as water development in the basin continues, remote, real-time monitoring allows Smith and other commissioners to keep up—and take care of the water users along Clear Creek—without hiring as many new staff.

Accounting for unseen flows Overseeing a stream like Clear Creek, where water is tight and surface water diversions account for most water use, is difficult enough. But in the lower South Platte Basin, the basic job of a water commissioner—matching supply and demand in accordance with the prior appropriation system—has an added layer of complexity. That’s because the river’s alluvial aquifer connects groundwater and surface water flows, so that a well that pumps miles from the river can eventually affect the river itself. To avoid harming senior surface water right holders, well owners band together and adopt augmentation plans, detailing how they will replace their well depletions with releases of surface water from reservoirs or groundwater recharge ponds. The plans vary depending on factors like a well’s distance from the river and the structure of the aquifer beneath, but with more than 400 augmentation plans in place across the basin, administering the river to account for both surface water diversions and the accretions and depletions of groundwater is an immensely complex task. To make matters even more difficult, water users are required to report their well pumping to the state just every 30 days. Until recently, determining whether well owners on a given stretch of river were replacing enough—or too much—water to compensate for their pumping meant poring over scores of individual well decrees and augmentation plans, a process that could take hours. Administering wells so close to the river that they affect surface water flows in less than 30 days was even

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TOP: Jason Smith can now administer the water in Clear Creek from his computer, even when heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in the field, saving him countless hours, thanks to remote streamflow monitoring.

PAULA GILLEN

LEFT: The Colorado Division of Water Resources HydroBase map viewer, part of Coloradoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Decision Support Systems, is a database that houses real-time, historic and geographic data. In this view, which includes Clear Creek, the squares and circles on the map indicate data points with information on diversions; structures; and stream, diversion and reservoir gauges.

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“

The impacts to the river from well pumping can go back 20 or 30 years, so inputting that data is going to be time consuming...”

BRENT SCHANTZ, Colorado Division of Water Resources

more difficult, since water commissioners were often forced to take well users at their word about how much they were pumping or replacing until the end of the month, when accounting came in. In spring 2017, thanks to the release of a computer model called the Alluvial Aquifer Accretions and Depletions Analysis Tool (AAADAT), it became much easier to account for unseen flows on a near-real-time basis. The tool combines thousands of individual well decrees and augmentation plans into a single database, allowing water commissioners to see with a few clicks of the mouse whether depletions match accretions on a particular stretch of the South Platte that day. “The commissioner can say, ‘Okay, I’ve got 16 people telling me they’re replacing 25 cubic feet per second on this reach of river today,’” says water engineer Kelly Close with Leonard Rice Engineers, who built AAADAT for the Colorado Division of Water Resources. If the tool reveals that replacements aren’t covering depletions, the commissioner can call individual water users to figure out who is not replacing enough. The tool has an added benefit: It can notify water users almost immediately when they have “excess accretions,” meaning they are putting more water back in the river than is needed to satisfy the water rights in priority that day. Excess accretions exist because augmentation tools like groundwater recharge ponds cannot be “turned off,” but instead seep continuously into the groundwater aquifer. On days when the recharge water they supply is not needed to satisfy a call on the river, the owner of a recharge pond can—with the approval of the division engineer—market that water to a user downstream or divert more into recharge to take advantage of excess accretions. Until the advent of AAADAT, though, water commissioners could rarely approve exchanges of excess accretions fast enough to capture them before they flowed downstream to Nebraska. Though a robust market for the exchange

of excess accretions has not yet materialized, an analysis by a nascent group called the Northeast Colorado Water Cooperative estimated that there may be between 15,000 and 30,000 acre-feet of excess augmentation water available for leasing in the lower South Platte Basin each year. The cooperative, headed by Joe Frank of the Lower South Platte Water Conservancy District, is aiming to serve as a clearinghouse for the exchange of excess augmentation water. As that market develops, water commissioners will rely on AAADAT to verify the excess water being traded actually exists, and that the trades taking place do not harm other water users. AAADAT has been rolling out in the spring and early summer of 2017, but there are obstacles to its implementation. For one, to function correctly, private well owners must enter reams of their historical well-pumping and augmentation data. In addition, the owners of wells and augmentation structures close enough to the river to affect surface water flows in less than 30 days will likely have to install real-time gauges on their wells and recharge ponds. Those gauges will send data directly to the AAADAT program so water administrators can verify in real time—and before monthly accounting arrives—whether users are meeting their augmentation obligations or have excess augmentation water to trade. “The impacts to the river from well pumping can go back 20 or 30 years, so inputting that data is going to be time consuming,” says Schantz.

Enabling complex water-sharing schemes If remote sensing and computer modeling have improved real-time management of both surface water and groundwater, they’ve also enabled complex water infrastructure projects that would be virtually impossible to administer without such technologies. The Water Infrastructure and Supply Efficiency (WISE) Partnership between Aurora Water, Denver Water, and 10 members of

the South Metro Water Supply Authority, which is scheduled to begin water deliveries to some members in mid-summer 2017, is a case in point. WISE builds on the $638 million Prairie Waters Project completed by Aurora Water in 2010. Prairie Waters pumps reusable transbasin diversion water from the lower South Platte River to Aurora’s Binney Water Purification Facility. From there, a portion is reused by Aurora, while the rest is piped to WISE members in the

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MATTHEW STAVER

Developers of the Water Infrastructure and Supply Efficiency (WISE) Web Portal, Klint Reedy, a consultant with CH2M; Logan Burba, engineer with South Metro Water Supply Authority; and Angie Brown, operations assistant at South Metro Water Supply Authority, work with the portal. The portal enables all 10 WISE partners to track and trade water without having to meet on a daily basis.

South Metro area through the WISE pipeline network. According to Rick Marsicek, director of engineering for the South Metro Water Supply Authority, this reduces his members’ reliance on non-renewable Denver Basin groundwater by satisfying about 10 percent of their overall water demand, while the reuse of WISE water will satisfy additional demand. The WISE Water Delivery Agreement specifies that Aurora and Denver must provide an average of

7,225 acre-feet annually over a 10-year period to the other WISE members, who buy a share of the total flow through pro-rata subscriptions. Yet the amount that Aurora and Denver put into the system varies depending on available supplies, so WISE members may need to adjust their project intake valves as often as once per day. Coordinating those flow changes, meeting the needs of all 10 WISE members, and facilitating water trades between them is

H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

the goal of a tool called the WISE web portal, which was developed by Leonard Rice Engineers and debuted when the project began operating this summer. “There is a whole lot of complexity in this project, and through years and years of negotiation, this tool came to the fore as something we needed right at the onset of operations,” says Logan Burba, water resources engineer at the South Metro Water Supply Authority. “There are ways we could

WISE developers find it hard to imagine how WISE partners would trade water without the web portal. Pictured at the Smoky Hill Water Tank in Aurora are portal developers along with South Metro Water Supply Authority staff (left to right) Mark Mitisek, Leonard Rice Engineers; Ben Tyler, Leonard Rice Engineers; Klint Reedy, CH2M; Logan Burba, South Metro Water Supply Authority; Katy Kaproth-Gerecht, Leonard Rice Engineers; and Angie Brown, South Metro Water Supply Authority.

It’s hard to imagine how WISE would work without a tool like this.”

Tracking water from above Precise, real-time water management is vital in water-sharing agreements of all kinds, from multi-lateral partnerships like WISE to efforts to share water between agriculture and other uses. In recent years, technology companies have sprung up to help farmers carefully track their water use and quantify consumptive use savings from techniques like rotational fallowing, crop switching, or deficit irrigation, all of which free up water that an irrigation district or ditch company can then lease directly to municipalities. “You can’t get paid for what you don’t track, so data is key,” says Kevin France, CEO

of SWIIM System, the operating company affiliated with Denver-based technology incubator Regenesis Management Group. France’s firm operates in Colorado, Arizona and California and makes an on-farm planning and water tracking package called SWIIM that allows farmers to enter data on their fields, soil types, crops, planting dates, and historic water use. Using that information, the software recommends ways to save water. To document a farmer’s water budget, SWIIM uses a wide range of remote sensors, from pipe sensors that measure inflow to the farm to soil moisture monitors to a custom-built tailwater sensor that gauges water flowing off a field. Yet the company also takes advantage of aerial monitoring technologies that use multi-spectral cameras mounted on drones,

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MATTHEW STAVER

manage this system without a tool like this, but this tool will make our lives much, much easier, keep our lines of communication very clean, and hopefully reduce the potential for human error.” Here’s how it works: Early in the morning on days when Aurora alters the amount of water they are supplying to WISE—an event known as a flow change—the web portal sends an email to WISE members, notifying them of the share they are entitled to and asking how much they want, whether they plan to use it for direct use or for storage, whether they plan to execute any water trades with other WISE members, and how much pipeline capacity they need to move their water. When members take less than their full share and do not designate their water to another member, unallocated water automatically flows into a surplus pool in the web portal, where other members can request it. After a flow change and once every member has requested their desired water and capacity, the web portal locks them out and the South Metro Water Supply Authority reviews all requests to ensure the system can handle them. Some trades between members at opposite ends of the project, for instance, may not be possible due to limited pipeline capacity. The web portal then exports a list of valve set points, which an operator enters to remotely adjust the intake valves of every WISE member. For billing and tracking purposes, each intake valve is separately metered and each member gets a monthly bill. Remarkably, on the day of a flow change this entire sequence of events—which involves up to 15 players selecting from a long list of interdependent variables—is completed by mid-afternoon. Since Aurora and Denver can change the quantity of water they provide to WISE members daily, the WISE web portal is critical in enabling members to quickly respond. “This project exists to provide renewable supplies to an area that has been highly reliant on groundwater for a long time, and this tool gives members the ability to look at their systems in real time and understand how things are working,” says Mark Mitisek of Leonard Rice Engineers, who helped develop the WISE web portal. “It also allows WISE members to more easily take advantage of times when there is excess supply or move quickly to allocate limited supplies in times of shortage.

“

On the Western Slope, we have hundreds of entities monitoring and moving water around using everything from telemetry to ditch riders in their pickup trucks. The decentralization makes investments of scale and scope very difficult.”

PERRY CABOT, Colorado State University’s Western Colorado Research Center

planes or satellites to indirectly measure things like plant health and evapotranspiration, the amount of water taken up and released by plants as they grow. One major provider of multispectral imagery is the U.S. Geological Survey, whose Landsat satellites orbit the earth every eight days and provide a snapshot of changes in water use by plants on the ground. In western Colorado’s Grand Valley, that data may soon be used to help verify the consumptive use savings achieved in a water banking pilot project underway during the 2017 growing season. A coalition of municipalities and nonprofit groups are paying growers there to fallow a portion of their land and leave their unused irrigation water in the river to help replenish water levels in Lake Powell. Landsat measurements—verified by remote sensors on the ground—could help determine how much water these temporary fallowing agreements actually save, and thus their potential to affect the river basin more broadly if expanded. “The information that can be gleaned from Landsat has tremendous potential to tell us how much water crops are actually using, versus how much is being diverted,” says Perry Cabot, research and extension leader at Colorado State University’s Western Colorado Research Center. “There are a number of management questions you can answer once you know that. If a farmer is interested in participating in a transfer, both the farmer and the recipient of that water can look at a map and understand how much transferable water could materialize.” Aside from improving the accuracy of water use estimates, Cabot says, aerial tools like Landsat also provide a system-wide, bird’s-eye view of water use in Colorado that is tough to get given the decentralized nature of water management in the state. “On the Western Slope, we are divided by so many ditch companies and so many entities managing water that it’s very hard to get a

handle on how much water crops are consuming,” he says. “The ability to scan broad swaths of land lets you overcome that to some degree.”

Taking real-time management basin wide There are clear benefits to the kind of realtime, precise water management made possible by current technology: It enables better river administration with fewer resources, allows water users to adapt more quickly to water shortages or excesses, aids in the tracking of unseen phenomena like groundwater flow and evapotranspiration, and permits large and complex water-sharing schemes to function. Why, then, has such management not been deployed across Colorado and throughout entire river basins? There are a range of reasons. Although the cost of remote water-monitoring technology—from data loggers to modems to cameras—is falling, Colorado lacks a dedicated funding stream to pay for installing, maintaining and replacing it across the state. CWCB grants like those employed by Jason Smith to install telemetry on Clear Creek can cover some up-front expenses, but technology inevitably malfunctions, fails or falls victim to vandalism, requiring repair or replacement. “I have a couple of spare solar panels and a couple of spare data loggers, but if something broke tomorrow we would have to go begging to the water user who relies on that data for money to replace it,” says Schantz, the South Platte Basin water commissioner. “We have to find a way to fund this technology more permanently.” The basic structure of Colorado water administration is another obstacle. Technologies like Landsat imagery provide a landscape-scale snapshot of estimated evapotranspiration, but in a state where water is managed by individual ditch companies and municipalities, it is unclear how H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

data crossing jurisdictional boundaries would be maintained, interpreted and used. To illustrate this point, Cabot contrasts water management on the Western Slope of Colorado with management in California’s Imperial Irrigation District, a major agricultural breadbasket. Both areas encompass hundreds of thousands of irrigated acres. “There is one front door to the Imperial Irrigation District,” he says. “Their control center looks like an air traffic control room, with 50 monitors tracking the movement of water across the district. On the Western Slope, we have hundreds of entities monitoring and moving water around using everything from telemetry to ditch riders in their pickup trucks. The decentralization makes investments of scale and scope very difficult.” Any effort to share real-time water data must also account for differences in the way it is collected by water users. Municipalities, for instance, might employ distinct methods of collecting water data at the household or apartment building level. Some states define the use of water as the amount diverted, while others define it as the amount consumed. Yet water managers say that such differences in methodology and terminology can be overcome if they are accounted for when data is shared. Perhaps more daunting are the cultural norms of water management, where privacy is prized and data sharing is sometimes viewed as risky, since any shared data can theoretically be used against you in a future legal battle. Even these attitudes, long held by water providers, are being challenged by new technology, as Landsat imagery makes detailed water use data available to the public without data sharing agreements or consent. “With Landsat, you can see on a basinby-basin basis how much certain crops are using right now,” says Ted Kowalski, who leads the Colorado River Basin Initiative at the Walton Family Foundation, whose grants have recently targeted water data advances. “There are tools out there to get this information. That makes water providers less hesitant to share it themselves.” n Nelson Harvey is a freelance reporter and editor based in Denver. He has written for Modern Farmer, High Country News and many other publications. He also works as a private investigator for the Kass Research Group. See more of his work at nelsonharvey.com. 35

The Rio Grande Basin Roundtable calls for strong data and forecasting focused on streamflows, wetlands and environmental assets, as opposed to municipal water use, as Colorado works to update its Statewide Water Supply Initiative. 36

CO LO R A D O FOU N DAT I O N FO R WAT E R E DUC AT I O N | YOU RWAT E RCO LO R A D O.O RG

Mapping Colorado’s Water Future

RICHARD MYRUP, RED ROCKS COMMUNITY COLLEGE/COURTESY WESTERN RESOURCE ADVOCATES

ANDY COOK/COURTESY WESTERN RIVERS CONSERVANCY

n late January 2017, Governor John Hickenlooper stood in front of the crowd that had gathered in Denver for the Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention to address an issue that had been slowly bubbling to the surface among the state’s water leaders and stakeholders. “We certainly have a wealth of water data now—more than we’ve ever had,” he began. “We’re very supportive of having a hub for water data … a nexus, a place where you know you can get the data. I’m a firm believer that getting more information into the hands of decision makers, the people who are going to use it, creates innovation, new ideas, and better solutions.” To many, water data is where energy data was 40 years ago. At that time, it took the perceived petroleum shortages of the 1970s— and the resulting energy crisis—to push stakeholders to start paying attention to energy-use data. With water now facing a similar future, and immersed in a fast-growing data-sharing landscape, Colorado water planners and engineers are working to make data access and collection a higher priority. This is showing up at Colorado’s lead water policy and protection agency. The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) embarked this past winter on its first update of the Statewide Water Supply Initiative (SWSI) since 2010, when Dropbox was still in its in-

Governor Hickenlooper charged Colorado with developing a hub for water data at the Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention in January 2017.

fancy and Google Drive was two years away from launching. With a world of new technology at their fingertips, CWCB employees hope the new update will create a positive downstream effect for water users. The update’s final report is expected in early 2018. The Statewide Water Supply Initiative is a comprehensive, technical analysis of water supply and demand projections for all different types of water uses on a statewide scale. Forecasting Colorado’s water future is no easy task—and it’s one that ultimately relies on myriad data collected from stakeholders all over the state. Some data is relatively simple to both collect and understand. Things like streamflow and rainfall measurements fit into

BY GLORIA DICKIE H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

More comprehensive and open water data could facilitate involvement for more Coloradans in making decisions that protect and improve the things they value including recreation, environmental health, local food production, and safe drinking water.

Coombs says that while the SWSIs have provided a good overview of the state’s projected needs, his basin’s interests are unique, as they don’t have strong municipal pressures. “Our water gaps aren’t the same, and so our planning is very concentrated to our issues.” Coombs says he’d like to see the SWSIs collect more basin-specific data to address their nonconsumptive environmental needs. “We’ve been trying to increase our ability to forecast streamflows because of changes in the watershed that affect fishing and some rafting; how to keep our wetlands wet; and how to keep floods from wildfires from inundating these areas.” But Chris Kurtz, a consultant with CDM Smith who is leading the environmental

floo-uhnt water fact

The Colorado Water Conservation Board is working with three consulting firms and 12 sub-consultants to complete the SWSI update, calling on experts in facilitation, climate change, data visualization, financing, various water needs and values, modeling and more.

and recreation assessment for the SWSI update, says it’s rare for states to even consider nonconsumptive needs. “It’s pretty remarkable that the environmental and recreation assessment exists. Colorado already pays more attention to this than any other state.” Fortunately for Coombs, the SWSI update will take a more complex approach to water supply planning, focusing on adaptive management. “In this version, we’ll be looking at multiple futures,” says Beorn Courtney, an engineer with Element Water Consulting who is working on the municipal and industrial water demand management portion of the update. This will be achieved by considering different combinations of variables, she says, such as economic growth, social values, climate change, and regulatory oversight, in order to produce different scenarios. According to the CWCB’s Rebecca Mitchell, who directs and implements the SWSI process, planners realized that the many uncertainties of the future called for fresh refinements to this update, along with future updates to Colorado’s Water Plan. “How can you determine water need, not just by looking at population growth, but by looking at the sociological pieces—people’s views on water and the land?” asks

CO LO R A D O FOU N DAT I O N FO R WAT E R E DUC AT I O N | YOU RWAT E RCO LO R A D O.O RG

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this category, where numbers can be gathered automatically from gauges—though many streams in Colorado lack proficient monitoring. Population data, too, is collected every 10 years by the federal census. Other data, such as water use, are more complicated, requiring further context and categorization, such as separating consumptive uses that deplete streamflows from nonconsumptive uses that don’t. Planners and engineers on the 2010 SWSI update—the first SWSI was released in 2004—had the ambitious aim of assessing Colorado’s water demands 40 years into the future. They began by using statewide data to establish a baseline of current water use and then compared it with projected population growth. From there, analysts were able to look at the potential impact of increasing municipal demand on agricultural water in addition to new pressures on recreational and environmental water resources. All of this data was sent to the nine state basin roundtables—Arkansas, Colorado, Gunnison, Metro, North Platte, Rio Grande, South Platte, Southwest, and Yampa-White. Stakeholders from each roundtable used the SWSI to assess their basin’s water needs and formulate an implementation plan to meet any projected water supply gaps. These plans, along with SWSI 2010, went on to inform Colorado’s Water Plan in 2015. Because the Statewide Water Supply Initiative draws on everything from population figures to commercial river-rafting user days, gathering data is a monumental task. In past updates, the CWCB faced challenges with both the uniformity and quality of the information it received, leading some to question the transparency, accuracy and accessibility of the data guiding Colorado’s long-term water decision making. Moreover, some stakeholders raised concerns that the SWSIs weren’t collecting and analyzing data applicable to all of Colorado’s basins, focusing too much on municipal centers. Nathan Coombs serves as chair of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable. Located in the southern part of the state, the Rio Grande Basin encompasses some 8,000 square miles of high mountains and low-lying valleys, with 200,000 acres of wetlands. Every spring and fall, the entire Rocky Mountain population of sandhill cranes migrates through the basin. Endangered species like the southwest willow flycatcher and threatened bald eagle call this area home. Fewer than 50,000 people can claim to do the same.

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Mitchell, providing an example of the deeper layers the SWSI update will address. These layers include political choices, as well as how Coloradans address land use planning in connection with water. Moreover, planners will look at future climate variables, which weren’t included in 2010. This means the CWCB will be collecting new data on these fronts—though what sources they will tap has yet to be decided. On the municipal side of data gathering, one of the biggest changes since the last SWSI update was the adoption of House Bill 1051 in 2010—along with its implementation starting in 2014—which requires the state’s large water providers to report water use and conservation data on an annual basis for future water supply analyses. For water engineers like Courtney, the bill could put an end to a logistical nightmare. “At the end of SWSI 2010, we thought ‘Wow, if we’re going to keep doing this into the future, it would really help to have regular reporting from major providers—not scrambling at the last minute and asking for their data,’” Courtney recalls. Until then, engineers were essentially at the mercy of water providers to pass along water use information, she says, which often meant data was coming in at different times, in different formats—if it was supplied at all. Now, with a few years of routine reporting down, this update will be the first test of the bill’s impact on future demand planning. Getting complete, standardized, and accurate data into the hands of Colorado’s water engineers and planners is only half the battle. For open data advocates, if that same data isn’t publicly accessible, it’s not enough. Open data is defined as data that is free; accessible to all—not just the organization that collected or generated it; machinereadable; and provides unrestricted rights to use, free of limiting contracts. Having open water data ultimately underscores a transparent and open government, encourages public and private innovation, and can reveal potential biases or errors in data analyses. Under the Colorado Open Records Act, most public records must be made available to the public upon request. But while much water data in Colorado is, in a sense, available, that doesn’t mean it fits the definition of “open.” Most major water analyses, including the SWSIs, have been distributed as PDFs or physical documents, which can be a barrier to stakeholders or consumers wanting to do their own

analysis as the base data either must be manually culled from the document or isn’t shown at all. As work on the SWSI update gets underway, Colorado’s water planners are still trying to figure out the best way to collect and distribute water data among agencies—and to the public. One faction of consultants is working to ensure the data and information generated as part of the SWSI effort are organized, modeled and analyzed in a way that’s helpful for the basin roundtables in their implementation planning, as well as for other user groups. “We’re considering how to distill the data sets associated with the SWSI into information that is relevant and consumable,” says Matt Lindburg with Brown and Caldwell, who is serving as a consulting project manager on the SWSI update. This distillation includes new tools and datasets that the roundtables can easily update, such as models looking at future water demands, hydrology or steamflow where roundtables can input different data or add potential projects to forecast how they would perform under different future scenarios. And while the 1051 bill requiring regular, standardized reporting on water use from municipal water providers sounds good on paper, Greg Johnson, who works in the CWCB’s water supply planning division, notes it doesn’t come with much enforcement. “The only hook we have is that large water providers can’t get funding from us if they don’t report data,” he says, noting that many don’t pursue funding anyway, so the incentive just isn’t there. By and large, data reporting has improved, but there are still a lot of holes in consistent reporting, he adds. Then there’s the matter of the sheer quantity of data, kept in different formats on different servers across the state. SWSI 2010 relied heavily on a few spreadsheets with huge volumes of data that were incredibly complicated to hand off to someone else, says Johnson. As a result, most of that data was distilled into visuals, like a bar graph showing predicted agricultural water demands and shortages by 2050, or a table showing the estimated water demands for snowmaking in ski-heavy counties. Many of these were unaccompanied by methodology or data citations in the published report. Fortunately, the data-sharing landscape has changed drastically since 2010. Many H E A DWAT E R S | SUMM E R 2017

of the past limitations on data accessibility were attributable to insufficient technology for distribution. For the current SWSI update, open data advocates recommend using data-sharing platforms and online open data portals—putting all data into an easily accessible format that’s the same across the board. The Colorado Information Marketplace, the state’s big data site that already houses some water information, is one central option that Johnson says those working closely on SWSI are considering. “[The CWCB] is more focused on delivering raw data this time around,” says Johnson. “We’re looking at what the important data sets [are], and how we’re going to structure those appropriately to deliver open data.” Outside of state government, other players are entering the open water data game, too. Will Sarni is the founder of WetData, an up-and-coming nonprofit designed to facilitate access to Colorado’s water data—primarily by the public sector but with a goal to integrate private data where possible. “Every stakeholder makes better informed decisions with access to data. If you have a dollar to invest in water infrastructure, it’s like throwing a dart if you don’t understand water scarcity issues and projections, and where you need to make that investment,” says Sarni. “Transparent, readily accessible water data is what we want to drive towards.” And yet as we move forward, it’s still surprising to engineers like Courtney how little information is available online concerning water when other information is so prevalent. “You can Google somebody and find out so much information about them, but you can’t easily find the total water use for the city over the past year,” she says. “It’s an interesting conundrum.” n Gloria Dickie is a freelance science and environmental journalist based in Boulder, Colorado. Her work appears in High Country News, National Geographic News, bioGraphic magazine, and Hakai magazine, among others. A Great Lakes native, the complexities of western water law never cease to amaze her. TAKE THE NEXT STEP Engage with Colorado’s Water Plan, review the Statewide Water Supply Initiative (SWSI) 2010, and find the latest on this year’s SWSI update at cwcb.state. co.us.

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