1. Developing an Operational Water Reservoir and Data Visualization Tool David Sathiaraj, PhD Assoc. Director for Computing (NOAA Southern Regional Climate Center) Research Asst. Professor, LSU Department of Geography Thana-on Punkasem Graduate Student (NOAA Southern Regional Climate Center) Margret Boone Program Manager (NOAA-RISA’s Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program)

2. Context NOAA Southern Regional Climate Center @ LSU 1/6 Regional Climate Centers in US Big Data holdings and Climate Data Services ACIS - Applied Climate Information Systems Web-services/APIs for a Big Data Warehouse Provides access to Climate Data (Hourly/Daily), Grids (Climate Change Models, Interpolated) SCIPP - Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program (a joint NOAA RISA program between LSU and Univ. of Oklahoma).

3. Need For A Reservoir Database Initial Interest - Southern Plains Drought in 2011-2012. Stakeholders - water policy managers, drought planners at city/municipality/county levels. No consolidated data/information repository for states in Southern US. No near real-time information system.

4. Building a Water Reservoir Information System Each reservoir requires: static information elevation-area-capacity information (based on the most recent reservoir survey), flood pool, conservation pool and dead pool elevations dynamic information - real-time, on-site elevation level (most often reported via USGS).

5. Challenges Diverse and Disconnected Data holdings - some reservoirs managed by Army Corps, some by BoR, some by DOTD. Real-time gauge updates are provided through USGS. Data from some agencies (eg. LA Army Corps) are considered proprietary. Data - messy, sparse or erroneous.

7. Reservoir Information System’s Features Covers TX, OK and LA. System has more than 300 reservoirs out of which 130 report actively. The tool plots: A historical time series of capacity levels (spanning more than 20 years) Real-time information on current elevation. Elevation-area-capacity curves based on reservoir surveys the ability to find rainfall amounts at rainfall stations near the reservoir.

10. Applications Some Big Data research applications: how much rainfall is needed to fill-up a reservoir after a prolonged drought effect of evaporation on reservoir levels deriving algorithms for climate-informed reservoir operations. Great training data for machine learning algorithms - developing efficient climate resilience and water sustainability strategies.

11. Feedback “Such collaborative efforts have already supported a water reservoir visualization tool for water managers... in Southern US” - as quoted in a proposed version of 2015-16 President’s budget.

12. Some URLS Reservoir Tool: http://reservoir.srcc.lsu.eduhttp://reservoir.srcc.lsu.edu More Climate Data Tools: http://southernclimate.org/pages/data-tools http://southernclimate.org ACIS API: http://data.rcc-acis.orghttp://data.rcc-acis.org