Research and Development Office

Near-Real-Time Visualization of Water Quality in Rivers and Estuaries in the western United States.

Project ID: 7172
Principal Investigator: Michael Fitzmaurice
Research Topic: Water Operation Models and Decision Support Systems
Funded Fiscal Years: 2013
Keywords: salinity, water quality, visualization, san joaquin river

Research Question

Real-time water quality conditions are often an important factor water managers must consider when making operational decisions. For example, dam operators in the Pacific Northwest may be concerned with optimizing reservoir releases to meet water temperature standards for salmon during the summer months. Similarly, operators of managed wetlands in California's Central Valley may wish to schedule wetland drawdown during a time of high assimilative capacity of receiving waters so as to meet salinity standards. Despite the ubiquity of monitoring data available from numerous websites, currently there are few tools that allow the water manager to easily retrieve, summarize, and visually interpret data from multiple stations. Such a tool could aid water managers in making operations decisions.

The objective of this study is to investigate different technologies and/or platforms for a visualization tool - or suite of tools - that allow managers to visually track any number of water quality constituents in near real time.

Need and Benefit

The scoping effort outlined above provides an avenue for Reclamation to positively interact with other agencies and stakeholders to meet the common goal of reducing human induced impacts to water quality. The scoping effort may lead to a viable project that would streamline information gathering required to make sound water management decisions in near real-time that affect water quality.

Contributing Partners

Contact the Principal Investigator for information about partners.

Research Products

A scoping document will be submitted for public viewing.

---

Return to Research Projects