Integration of Water Data for Decision‐Making and Research

As consumers, citizens, and professionals, we are constantly faced with questions such as: How much water is available in different parts of the country under shifting demographic and land use conditions? What pollutants are found in the nation’s waters? Where in the nation are these different pollutants found, and at what concentrations? How many people are exposed to these pollutants? What are the costs and benefits of different control technologies and corrective actions? How should one incorporate such factors in the process of resource allocation? What do the experts say? What are some of the social and political ramifications of deferring or not deferring to expert judgments on these issues in a democratic society? These are perennial questions and will no doubt play an important role in anyone’s list of water resource decision-making and research priorities over the next two decades. Attributes of water such as rainfall, runoff, storage levels, contaminants, health effects, voting records, funding levels, and public outrage are diverse in the context of physical, chemical biological, economic, perceptual, and other characteristics and are measured in different units at various scales. Such measurements of diverse attributes also vary over space and time. The instruments that are used to measure such attributes are also subject to variation and uncertainty. So, the process of integration and synthesis of diverse water-related attributes and their uncertain measurements to meet end-objectives is quite complicated. To understand such questions of diversity in attributes and uncertainty of measurements, global, federal, state and local governments have invested billions of dollars for the collection, storage, and maintenance of water quantity and quality, exposure, toxicity, and public perception data on an on-going basis. Information derived from such data influences regulatory and policy decisions that cost taxpayers further tens of billions of dollars annually for water-related decisions (Carlin et al. 1992, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2009, U.S. Geological Survey 2009). Despite these enormous investments, the integrated use of data in research and the policy-making process has been limited. Recognizing the importance of this subject, the United Nations Statistics Division (Vardon and Martinez 2009) hosted a session on “Data Integration and Dissemination: From Data to Information” at the recent 5th World Water Forum, held in March 2009, in Istanbul, Turkey. A comprehensive review of water resources literature, laws, budgets, and analyses of selected data sets reveal the central role played by the twin factors of diversity of attributes and uncertainty in measurements in our understanding of many water issues (Brands and Rajagopal 2008 a, b, c, Rajagopal et al. 1992b). The key findings of many recent water resources research analyses can be summed up as managing diversity in a world of uncertainty. Enabling our institutions to develop a research infrastructure to manage water laws, science, and technology so as to effectively utilize and combine the diversity of attributes and uncertainty in their measurements at different scales for the protection and management of water resources will be a major challenge in the next two decades (Colaceci et al. 2008, Kumar and Singh 2005, Loucks et al. 2006, Rejman 2007, Vardon 28