Water Managers Flooded With Data Struggle To Interpret It

Federal and state officials say they are receiving a flood of water data, but making sense of it isn’t always easy.

“Instantaneous results from real-time monitoring can be challenging. How do we interpret this data in a meaningful way?” David Hindin, a senior policy director at the U.S. EPA, said at the annual meeting of the Association of Clean Water Administrators, per Bloomberg BNA.

Advanced monitoring techniques, however, do provide various benefits to overseers, enabling them to “prevent, treat, and reduce pollution” before a problem becomes a water-quality violation, he said, per the report.

These techniques “help in assessing environmental quality and targeting resources, preventing pollution hot spots from developing, providing for more transparency, engaging the public in monitoring activities and helping to determine compliance with underlying environmental laws,” the report said, citing Hindin.

Interpretation is likely to become harder over time as technology catches more data, some experts say.

“Technology will make our life easier, but data interpretation will become more difficult and important,” said Derek Smithee, water quality programs division chief for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, per the report.

Some of the challenges, per the report:

For one, members of the public may identify pollution problems based on data that isn't credible because it wasn't collected using established EPA or state monitoring protocols. He also said data may be collected from a monitoring device of which the EPA or the state is unaware, or real-time data may be incorrectly interpreted for standards that are based on longer-term averages, such as the daily average for a particular pollutant.

Economic pressure is pushing the water sector to become more rich with data, according to an analysis by Will Sarni, a director for water strategy at Deloitte Consulting.

In an editorial in GreenBiz, Sarni spelled out forces improving data availability in the water sector, including the increased use of mobile broadband in general, as well as a growing awareness that government “must do better to provide access to local, state and federal databases,” Sarni wrote.

He cited a White House initiative known as “moonshot for water.” At a White House forum in December, federal officials sought to encourage “technological advances and private-sector investment to rebuild water projects like reservoirs, boost data collection, support water-sharing agreements and find new technologies to recycle and conserve water,” USA Today reported.

In addition, entrepreneurs are becoming more active on water issues, Sarni said. “Water technology hubs and accelerators such as ImagineH2O, the Global Water Center, WaterStart and WaterTAP are bringing entrepreneurs together to address water challenges,” he wrote.

Sarni highlighted the benefits of improving data around water issues. The benefits, per his analysis:

• Public sector with integrated (local, state, regional and national scale) water data to drive innovative public policy decisions.
• Civil society (homeowners and anyone with a mobile phone) with the ability to access data without the need to rely upon public sector databases, utilities and agencies.
• Investors with access to data to make more informed decisions (imagine having the same confidence in water data that we do with financial data?) on investments in 21st century infrastructure — "smarter" centralized, distributed and decentralized systems.
• Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with water data so they are better equipped to drive collective action initiatives within watersheds, regions and nationally.
• Opportunities for cross industry collaboration on addressing the energy-water-food nexus challenges.
• Entrepreneurs with the ability to understand market failures and business opportunities in areas such as treatment technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT).