A data centric culture is difficult to cultivate without effective data infrastructure and systems. This session will explore the technological underpinnings and value to users of new and established data systems. Operational data systems (deployed software that stores, organizes, provides APIs or other interfaces to access or manipulate data) make data more accessible to more people, easier for them to manipulate and analyze, and can enable larger volumes of users to utilize larger volumes of data in a systematic way.
Descriptions:
The Challenges of Modernizing Enterprise Software in the Federal Space: The NWIS Case Study
Daniel K. Pearson, USGS
The National Water Information System (NWIS) Modernization program has been on a 5-year journey to provide the necessary improvements to NWIS, the world's largest authoritative enterprise water information system. After recognizing that the legacy NWIS was both inflexible, and suffering from extensive technological debt in 2019, the USGS Water Mission Area kicked off a 10M/year investment to reduce the risk of system failure due to aging infrastructure. A modernized NWIS was needed to support a robust, authoritative enterprise water information system which is foundational to advancing WMA priorities and meeting the needs of USGS stakeholders. This talk will focus on "lessons learned" and highlight aaccomplishments and what is next for NWIS!
Lessons from 18 Years of Building Operational Systems at the National Earthquake Information Center
Mike Hearne, USGS
The Real-Time Products (RTP) team at the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) has been creating various earthquake triggered products since before 2007. Some of these products include: ShakeMap, a system designed to estimate and make maps of ground shaking in the region around an earthquake; PAGER, a system that estimates shaking-related fatalities and economic losses; gmprocess, software designed to automatically download, process, and derive peak ground motions from seismometers. These software systems, among others, feed information to each other and to the Earthquake Hazards Program website. Most of these systems are deployed on-premise, but we have had recent success migrating ShakeMap to the Amazon cloud. This talk will focus on the experiences gained from working on these 24/7 mission critical systems, what expertise is needed, and what decisions need to be made to facilitate deployment and operations.
Data-Driven Streamflow Drought Forecasts for the Conterminous United States (CONUS): Preparing for the Upcoming Launch of an Operational Tool to Enhance Drought Early Warning
John Hammond, USGS
Hydrological drought, defined as abnormally low streamflows and groundwater levels, has direct impacts on agriculture, hydropower, ecosystems, public water supply, and recreation. Unlike more readily-available precipitation forecasts, forecasting streamflow drought requires accounting for storage (snow and groundwater), human modifications (diversions and reservoirs), and complex terrestrial processes. To address this challenge, the U.S. Geological Survey Water Mission Area Drought Program is working to advance early warning capacity for hydrological drought onset, duration, and severity using data-driven models. As we prepare for the launch of the streamflow drought assessment and forecasting tool launch later this year, we are incorporating stakeholder input to design a website that complements existing drought and water supply prediction tools.
Last Mile Data Delivery for the National Water Availability Assessment Data Companion
Megan Hines, Kaycee Faunce, USGS
The National Water Availability Assessment Data Companion (NWDC) is a centralized website providing U.S. Geological Survey-derived water availability, supply, and use information that underlies the National Water Availability Assessment. The NWDC also extends Water Data for the Nation’s publicly available observed water data by providing modeled data that are spatially and temporally continuous, filling in spatial gaps between monitoring stations and temporal gaps between periodic sampling at these stations. These nationally consistent datasets are available at the monthly timescale and sub-watershed spatial scale (12-digit hydrologic unit codes). This presentation will explore innovative R and targets pipeline approaches developed by the NWDC team to power our integrated, dynamic website and associated tools. These approaches allow for the central management of website content and the transformation of model data outputs, enabling repeatable just-in-time data integration and improved accessibility of the data at a national level.
Automated georeferencing and feature extraction from geologic maps using the Polymer web application
Margaret Goldman, Joshua Rosera, Graham Lederer, Garth Graham, David Watkins
The Polymer web application is a human-machine interface (HMI) designed to support geologic map compilation, georeferencing, and data extraction for mineral resource assessment workflows. Geologic maps provide essential data for assessments, including information about lithology, geologic structure, geomorphology, and evidence of mining and mineral prospecting. Unfortunately, the vast majority of maps are not analysis-ready. The application supports search, upload, and download capabilities, along with inspection, validation, and correction of outputs from machine learning models designed to automate georeferencing and feature extraction tasks. Data layers prepared in Polymer can be brought into GIS software or directly fed into mineral prospectivity mapping pipelines developed as part of CriticalMAAS.
The Water Quality Portal: Enabling Access to Data from Multiple Agencies in a Common Format
Candice Hopkins, USGS
The Water Quality Portal (https://www.waterqualitydata.us/) is the largest water quality data warehouse in the United States containing over 400 million water quality records from over one million locations nationally sourced from over 1,000 water quality data providers, including every state, territory, and over 100 tribes and Nations. The Water Quality Portal was launched in 2012. Data have been successfully served on this platform for well over a decade, but evolving needs within the EPA and a modernization at the USGS has pushed the Water Quality Portal to take a new approach to bringing together multi-agency data. The modernization of the Water Quality Portal resulted in updated profiles and functionality of the application. An updated version of the WQX schema required new profiles to be created; the broader community of Water Quality Exchange users helped to determine profile types and iterated on the design of new profiles.
