California drought, vizualized with open data

http://cida.usgs.gov/ca_drought

Time period

2011-present weekly data represention

Data sources and methods

Dataset sources and methods used are briefly described on the page below. Follow links indicated below to access public data repositories. To access the specific datasets visualized at http://cida.usgs.gov/ca_drought, follow this link https://github.com/USGS-CIDA/CIDA-Viz and access repositories (e.g., reservoir datasets are found in ca_reservoir folder), or use the links below.

Drought data

• Data are plotted for the conterminous U.S. and for the State of California in the background map of the site.
• Site data and shapefiles from U.S. Drought Monitor: http://droughtatlas.unl.edu/Services/DroughtMonitor/Timeseries/
• Dataset and detailed methods can be found at https://github.com/USGS-CIDA/CIDA-Viz/tree/master/ca_drought

Reservoir data

• Reservoir capacities (State of California jurisdiction): http://www.water.ca.gov/damsafety/docs/Jurisdictional2014.pdf
• Reservoir capacities (Federal jurisdiction): http://www.water.ca.gov/damsafety/docs/Federal2010.pdf
• Reservoir time series data: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryDaily. Reservoirs with daily observational data in the State of California are visualized; weekly averaged reservoir storage as a percent of total storage capacity is plotted through time.
• Reservoir area: Map depicts change in water area at Trinity Lake and Shasta Lake is based on Landsat satellite imagery collected on August 8, 2011, and August 16, 2014. Imagery were processed using algorithms presented in Xu (2007): http://info.asprs.org/publications/pers/2007journal/december/2007_dec_1381-1391.pdf. Map produced by Dr. Jamon Van Den Hoek ([email protected]) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
• Datasets and detailed methods can be found at https://github.com/USGS-CIDA/CIDA-Viz/tree/master/ca_reservoir

Snow data

• Snow water equivalent data from US Department of Agriculture, Conservation Service SNOTEL: http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snow/
• Retrieved all data from Snowtel sites with monthly data from 2010 to 2014
• Averaged each month for all sites to get monthly average snow in water equivalent
• Dataset and detailed methods can be found at https://github.com/USGS-CIDA/CIDA-Viz/tree/master/ca_snow

Discharge data

• Unregulated stream sites in California identified from U.S. Geological Survey GAGESII dataset: http://water.usgs.gov/GIS/metadata/usgswrd/XML/gagesII_Sept2011.xml
• Current and historical discharge data from U.S. Geological Survey NWIS dataset: http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/sw
• Log-transformed current discharge data are plotted against log-transformed mean discharge since 1980 for the day of year visualized, after the methods employed by and described at U.S. Geological Survey Water Watch: http://waterwatch.usgs.gov/.
• Datasets and detailed methods can be found at https://github.com/USGS-CIDA/CIDA-Viz/tree/master/ca_discharge