Invitation from the Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program (SWAMP), the California Water Quality Monitoring Council, the California Water Boards Data Center, and the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI):
As part of the Fourth Annual California Water Boards Water Data Science Symposium on July 1-2, 2019 in Sacramento, CA, you are cordially invited to participate in a datathon, or a day of data “hacking,” on three topics that would benefit greatly from better data integration. We are lucky to have great partners on this event, including the organizing team for the Safe Drinking Water Data Challenge, most notably the West Big Data Innovation Hub and the UC Berkeley Division of Data Sciences.
The data integration topics are:
- Water Source Time Machine:The State Water Board’s Division of Drinking Water regulates approximately 7,500 public water systems (PWS) in California. Although each PWS has a unique identifier, the current or former source(s) of water used by each system are not as easy to identify. Participants will work on conceptualizing how to develop a tool that would allow users to select a location within a PWS boundary and see where current and past sources of water come from (think “time machine for source water data”).
- Trash Data Model: The State Water Board’s Office of Information Management and Analysis (OIMA) is developing a new method to monitor and assess the quantity, distribution, and makeup of trash on streets to better understand the amount of trash entering (or being prevented from entering) California’s waterbodies. While a data model for this project has been developed, there is more work to do! We need to streamline the current data model, develop a corresponding data schema, and develop a way to integrate (1) data across temporal and geographic scales and (2) monitoring methods for trash, debris and microplastics, etc.
- Consumer Confidence Report (CCR) to Weather Report Application:Every community water system and every nontransient-noncommunity water system must prepare and distribute an annual Consumer Confidence Report (CCR) to their users. Each CCR contains information on source water, levels of any detected contaminants, and compliance with drinking water regulations (including monitoring requirements), along with some educational information. We would like to develop a way to allow public water systems to port their data to an application that, like a weather forecast application, allow geotagged data to integrate into and inform drinking water quality and sources of water datasets.
Interested parties are encouraged to register and attend the datathon to learn more about data science and/or working in areas of our mission related to drinking water and trash. We hope to host this datathon event every year as part of our Water Data Science Symposium and will expand the topics to other areas each year. And these three topics will have future opportunities to develop out as we move through the year and the Water Data Challenge for 2019. Civic data engagement is the present/future of all government work, and there is so much work to be done in the space of California water governing.
For more information, please contact Nick Martorano: SB1070Coordinator@waterboards.ca.gov
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