Background

Project Overview

Water resources are sources of water that are of sufficient quantity and quality to meet human needs, when and where they are needed. Therefore, they reflect both water supply – the usable sources of surface and groundwater, as well as demand, where and when water is being extracted for a purpose. Long-term water scarcity results when these two are out of balance, such that the human demand for water approaches the renewable supply. Sustainable use of water resources therefore requires the balanced allocation of renewable natural resources to people, farms and ecosystems. Balanced allocation in turn requires that we understand the nature of the available resources, including the mean, seasonal variability and extreme conditions.

The purpose of the State of Indiana Waters site is to create an up-to-date easily accessible web portal that geospatially displays metrics to convey the state of both Indiana ground and surface waters. The code written for this project retrieves data from Online water databases, such as those maintained by the USGS then completes automated data quality checking, and calculates metrics for the current state (end of last water year) and long-term trends for Indiana water resources. All analysis is conducted for the last 30 water years up to and including the most recent water year, which ends on September 30th as defined by the USGS. The current state of Indiana water resources is assigned based on a ranking of how the current groundwater and surface water metrics compare to previous water years. Long-term trends are also based on the last 30 water years of surface and groundwater data. Results from this analysis are summarized in four sets of metrics corresponding to the current state of groundwater, current state of surface water, groundwater trends, and surface water trends. These are imported into an Online ArcGIS platform to geospatially represent the location and status of water resources within Indiana using interactive webmaps. These webmaps are combined with snapshots of groundwater, and surface water levels, and the end of water year drought monitor can be found on the State of Indiana Water Resources Website.

Funding for the development of this website was provided by the Indiana Water Resources Research Center.