Research Project Technical Completion Report / Office of Water Research and Technology Project A-031-ARIZ / Annual Allotment Agreement No. 14-31-0001-5003 / FCST Research Category VII-C; OWRT Problem Area: 10 / Project Duration June 1971 to June 1975 / No publication date on item; publication date from catalog. / The Arizona Water Information System (AWIS) was developed for storage and retrieval of water resources data and for dissemination of water resources information pertaining to the State of Arizona. Collectively, the AWIS system contains a number of distinct elements. The Activity File is a listing of water resource activities and projects dating from 1961, which can be accessed by keywords or by agency to retrieve abstracts and information on approximately 1,000 projects; the file recently was updated and additional projects covered in a regional program pertaining to the Lower Colorado River Basin portions of Arizona, California, and Nevada. A bimonthly Arizona Water Resources News Bulletin and a companion Project Information Bulletin were initiated under this project and will be continued as a cooperative effort of the Arizona Water Commission and the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center and Office of Arid Lands Studies. A cassette-tape pilot series on Arizona water trends also was produced and evaluated for use potential, which appears favorable. A western state conference on water information dissemination, sponsored by this project and OWRT, was held in Phoenix in 1973, to discuss the above kinds of activities in the several states and the possibilities for cooperative regional activities. The capability for interactive hydrologic data processing, utilizing the DEC -10 computer system at the University of Arizona, was developed in 1974 with the support of the Arizona Water Commission (AWC). Ground-water and quality-of-water data furnished by AWC have been stored progressively in the system, and are retrievable by remote terminal through telephone hookup, by quarter- township grid location or by drainage basin. Routine inquiries can be answered rapidly, or more complex retrievals can be made as desired.

The demand and collection of hydrometeorological data is growing to support hydrologic and hydraulic analyses, and other studies. These data can amount to extensive information that requires sound data management to enable efficient storage, access, and use. While much of the globe is using technology to efficiently collect and store hydrometeorological data, other parts, such as developing countries, are unable to do so. This thesis presents an assessment of available river observations data in Latin American countries in Central America and the Caribbean. The assessment analyzes 1) access to available data, 2) spatial density of data, and 3) the temporal extents of data. This assessment determines that there are sections of the study area that constitute a drought of data or have limited data available.Furthermore, the development of an internationalized HydroServer Lite, a lite-weight web-based application for database and data management, is undertaken. A pilot program of the translated system in Spanish is established with an agency in each of the following countries: Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The internationalized version of HydroServer Lite promises to be a useful tool for these groups. While full implementation is currently underway, benefits include improved database management, access to data, and connectivity to global groups seeking to aid developing countries with hydrometeorological data.

The Hydrologic Information System Project of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) has successfully created a large-scale prototype Hydrologic Information System (HIS). This system catalogs and provides access to over 23 million time series of hydrologic data, which are distributed across the United States at various academic, research, and governmental data providers. The service-oriented architecture that enables the HIS comprises distributed hydrologic data servers, a centralized series catalog, and various client software applications, and is supported by WaterML, a standardized language for transmission of hydrologic data. The current architectural model, termed the Network-Observations Model, of the HIS relies on a searchable central catalog of series metadata. Harvesting series metadata from large federal data providers, such as the USGS, EPA, and NCDC, has proven a laborious undertaking and involves custom database migration tools. This time-consuming harvesting task, coupled with a multitude of custom-coded solutions at the central series catalog has led to concerns with the long-term sustainability of the current architectural model. A new architectural model, termed the Services Stack Model, is proposed in this thesis. In the proposed model, a catalog of services metadata, rather than of series metadata is used to connect hydrologic data consumers with data providers. Internationally-recognized web service and data encoding standards, including the upcoming WaterML2.0 specification, from the Open Geospatial Consortium are used as the backbone of the new model. The proposed model will hopefully lead to greater acceptance of the CUAHSI-HIS, and result in increased sustainability and reduced maintenance of the system in the long-term. / text

A Multi-Scale Hydrological Information System (HIS) includes three levels of HIS, which are the national CUAHSI HIS, the Texas HIS and the local Capital Area Council of Governments (CAPCOG) HIS. The CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System has succeeded in putting water data together using a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA). However, maintaining the current metadata catalog service has been problematic. An Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard transformation procedure is happening to transfer the current web services into OGC adopted services and models. The transformation makes CUAHSI HIS compliant with the international OGC standards and to have the capability to host tremendous water data. On a scaled down level, the Texas HIS has been built for the specific Texas hydrologic data, concerning the variables and the web services listed in this thesis. The CAPCOG emergency response system was initiated for the purpose of the Texas flash flood warning, including several data services, such as the USGS NWIS, the City of Austin (COA) and the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA). By applying the consistent mechanism, which is the OGC standards-based SOA, in these three scales of HIS, three catalogs of services can be created within the architecture, and hydrologic data services included in different catalogs can be searched across. Each catalog of services has a different scale or purpose. A technique, called KiWIS developed by the KISTERS Company, of publishing OGC standard web services through the WISKI hydrologic database was then described. The technique has been applied to the City of Austin’s water data hosted at CRWR. The OGC standard transformation progress reviewed in the thesis and the technique described can give a reference on how to synthesize Multi-Scale HIS within a standard mechanism. / text

From the Proceedings of the 1972 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - May 5-6, 1972, Prescott, Arizona / Land is subsiding over a heavily mined aquifer in south central Arizona. Subsidence damages are inventoried to help provide a basis upon which cost studies can be performed to determine actions to lessen the economic impact of these damages. Water table drawdown produces increasing loading stress by three ways: changes in bouyant support of aquifer grains, changes in water table, or both. Two types of subsidence are recognized--one-directional compression, and near surface phenomenon. Damages due to natural structures, and to man-made structures are reviewed. Agricultural damages include field releveling, ditch repair and well damage. Damages to transportational facilities include highways, bridges, pipelines, and railroads. Damages to domestic and urban structures are suggested. Questionnaires, interviews and on-site inspections were used to collect information on land subsidence damages in the study area.

From the Proceedings of the 1972 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - May 5-6, 1972, Prescott, Arizona / Numerous reports from the southwest claim that soil moisture prior to rainfall-runoff event has no influence on the resulting flow volumes and peak rates. Runoff occurs from many storms that would not be expected to produce runoff, and an explanation lies in the occurrence of antecedent rains. This hypothesis is tested by dividing runoff events into 2 subsets--one with no rain within the preceding 120 hours, and the other with some rain within the preceding 24 hours--and to test the null hypothesis. The hypothesis was tested with rainfall and runoff data from a 40-acre agricultural research service watershed west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, using the Wilcoxon's rank sum test. Various levels of statistical significance are discussed, and shown graphically, to conclude conclusively that antecedent rainfall influences runoff from a semiarid watershed.

From the Proceedings of the 1977 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - April 15-16, 1977, Las Vegas, Nevada / Mathematical simulation of the erosion process is accomplished by using a time series of hydrologic parameters as inputs into a modified form of the Universal Soil Loss Equation. A parameter to account for antecedent moisture conditions was found to improve the predictive success of the Universal Soil Loss Equation. The simulation predicts sediment yield resulting from a stochastic sequence of precipitation events on an experimental watershed. This sediment model will be used as a component in a larger, more complex hydrologic simulation model which can be used to determine optimum reclamation practices for the strip mined areas of the arid Southwest. Data from regraded strip mine spoils at the Black Mesa of Arizona are used in calibrating the model.

From the Proceedings of the 1977 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - April 15-16, 1977, Las Vegas, Nevada / Riverflow modeling is believed useful for purposes of decision making with respect to reservoir control, irrigation planning, and flood forecasting and design of structures to contain floods. This author holds the view that present riverflow models in vogue are unsatisfactory because, for one thing, sample simulations according to these models do not resemble observed southwestern river records. The purpose of this paper is to outline a general Markov model which assumes only that rivers have a finite memory. We show how to calibrate the model from river records and then present evidence to support our contention that some success has been realized in mimicking typical flows by our simulation procedure.

From the Proceedings of the 1971 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - April 22-23, 1971, Tempe, Arizona / Statistical analyses of existing hydrologic records suffer from the problem that such records are of relatively short duration, and therefore may not necessarily be random samples of the infinite population of events. On the hypothesis that tree-ring series and runoff series respond to a common climatic signal or signals that permit prediction of annual runoff from annual ring-width index, tree-ring data are used to extend available runoff records backwards in time to permit more accurate estimates of the 3 most common statistics used in hydrology: the mean, the variance and the 1st order correlation. It is assumed that both series are generated by the climatic parameters of precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, seasonal regime and spatial distribution. Of major concern in the reconstruction of annual runoff series from tree-ring records was the difference in persistence within each of the 2 series. A matrix of the tree-ring data was constructed, lagged up to 3 times and principal components were extracted. The covariation in this matrix was then decomposed by extracting the Eigen-vectors, and multiple regression was then used to weight the respective series and the differences in persistence were determined. This method was applied to watersheds of diverse characteristics and improved estimates of the mean and variance were obtained.

From the Proceedings of the 1972 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - May 5-6, 1972, Prescott, Arizona / The little chino valley in central Arizona presents an interesting groundwater study as withdrawals exceed recharge. The groundwater surface is falling at about 2 feet per year over most of the area due to large irrigation development. A shallow water table aquifer overlies the artesian aquifer and receives recharge from irrigation runoff. Water quality in the artesian aquifer is excellent. Water quality in the water-table aquifer is poorer, being somewhat higher in total salts, but is suitable for most domestic and agricultural uses. Specific yield for the supply area to the artesian aquifer is 12 percent, with estimated annual recharge of 4000 acre feet and leakage from the aquifer of 2300 acre feet. Water budget and use for the basin is presented with water level and water quality data. The multiphase aquifer system is described and illustrated.