Barriers and Benefits to Accessing Ground Water Information: Lessons from the Arizona Wells Project

A wealth of information on Arizona’s groundwater resources is contained in several state, federal, and local databases.  While sharing data and improving data accessibility have obvious benefits, serious technical and institutional hurdles exist.  Agencies use different geographic coordinate systems to identify well locations, and have largely incompatible database structures.  Other technical issues include firewalls, homeland security, and privacy of individual well owners.  New tools and techniques offer solutions to these problems, but other, less obvious institutional hurdles exist.  Database professionals may fear data will be misinterpreted by non-professionals, or that database shortcomings will become public.  Other concerns involve data ownership and the spotty record of academic/agency collaborations.  Thus, most attempts to merge or centralize water resource databases have failed, some after large expenditures of time and effort.
An alternative approach of developing web services that pull data as needed from multiple databases has been pursued by both CUAHSI’s Hydrologic Information System and the Arizona Water Institute’s Arizona Hydrologic Information System.  These persistent efforts reflect the huge potential benefits of data sharing, the promise of new data visualization tools, and the belief that academia can play a positive role.  Motivations for data holders to participate include ever-tighter agency budgets and growing stresses on water resources.  The value of groundwater data has grown as various factors increase the need for more intensive water resources management.  These include population pressures and related economic activity, climate fluctuations and change, and new pollutants and emerging pathogens.
Data integration efforts also can provide advanced data visualization features, including: on-the-fly generation of static maps and maps of changes over time; standard and advanced time series of depths, pumping and quality parameters; various spatial interpolations; and projections of time series data.  Finally, Web services can push data to under-served groups, including domestic well owners, through free subscription services.