Connecting Texas Water Data Workshop

Connecting Texas Water Data Workshop

Texas’ public and private companies, organizations, and agencies have collected water data for different purposes and at different scales for many years. These data are scattered across multiple platforms with different standards, often making important data sets inaccessible or incompatible. This leaves Texas’ decision makers, industries, landowners, and communities with significant amounts of data of limited use to support real-time decision making, development of opportunities for water security, or for modeling an accurate picture of Texas’ water future. To be useful in decision making, water data must not only be open and transparent, but presented in a way that is relevant to the needs of decision makers.

On April 17, 2018, the Connecting Texas Water Data Workshop was held at the Advanced Computing Center on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus of the University of Texas in Austin. The workshop brought together almost 90 invited data management experts and information experts representative of Texas’ government and water agencies, utilities, academia, business and industry, research institutes, and water associations and advocacy organizations.

The goal was to engage workshop participants – all leading Texas water stakeholders – in the identification of critical data needs and in the design of a data system that facilitates access to and use of water data in Texas.

A report is being drafted that provides information on the outcomes of that workshop’s presentations, discussions and facilitated stakeholder sessions.


Author

rudolph-rosen-aquatic-science

Rudolph Rosen,
Director of the Institute for Water Resources Science and Technology at Texas A&M University in San Antonio

Rudolph is a Visiting Professor and Director of the Institute for Water Resources Science and Technology at Texas A&M University in San Antonio, a Fellow of The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, and a former Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.