The National Ground Water Monitoring Network Data Portal: From Pilot to Production

The need for national groundwater monitoring is profound and has been recognized by organizations outside government as a major data gap for managing groundwater resources. To meet this need the Subcommittee on Ground-Water, established by the Federal Advisory Committee on Water Information, created a National Ground-Water Monitoring Network envisioned as a voluntary, integrated system of data collection, management and reporting that will provide data needed to address present and future groundwater management questions raised by Congress, by federal, state and tribal agencies and the public.

The Ground-Water Data Portal facilitates access groundwater data through one seamless web-based application from disparate sources. Data systems in the United States exist at many organizational and geographic levels; however, differing vocabulary and data structures have prevented data sharing and reuse. A pilot scale portal was completed in 2011, which functioned as a proof of concept for enabling the retrieval of and access to groundwater data on an as-needed basis from multiple, dispersed data repositories in a standard format. The system was also designed to allow the data to continue to be housed and managed by the data provider while being accessible for the purposes of the national monitoring network.

As the portal moves from the pilot phase toward full implementation, a need for a more robust and performant infrastructure was recognized. In order to address this requirement, the existing service based infrastructure was supplemented with an automated cache that serves as a secondary source for data when services are unavailable, has enhanced data retrieval performance and provides the ability for advanced querying and calculation of statistics. In addition a system was put into place to allow data providers to add and remove wells from the network and to manage their wells’ metadata in real-time.