Hydrologic Data Collection, Management, Analysis, and Sharing in Colorado River Basin

Due to changes in the climate and increased human consumptive uses, determining the availability of future water in the Colorado River Basin is critical. Availability of water can be estimated based on river discharge, precipitation, and air temperatures. Many research projects in the Colorado River Basin depend on these data. In order to simplify the data collection process for many projects, a single database with precipitation, temperature, and flow data from various sources was created. Discharge data were obtained from three independent sources while precipitation and temperature data were obtained from two independent sources. Using scripts in R, all the data was formatted and imported into a SQLite database named the Observation Data Model (ODM). The ODM provides researchers a vast amount of hydrologic data in a single database that can be easily downloaded. This product provides researchers the ability to spend less time gathering data and more time analysing the data.To determine the level of effort required to interact with the ODM, some minor analysis and plots were created in R. These plots revealed the disadvantage of using ODM rather than a gridded database. Extracting or querying the desired data is slightly more involved. To help mitigate this disadvantage, the process of extracting data is described in this report. The ODM and all associated input data and scripts were uploaded to public Hydroshare resource. This enables the ODM to be downloaded and used by anyone.