CaRDS – the statewide California Residential water Demand and Supply open dataset

As water scarcity becomes the new norm in the Western United States, states such as California have increased their efforts in water conservation. Achieving water security under climate change, population growth, and urbanization requires an integrated multi-sectoral approach, where adaptation strategies combine supply and demand management interventions. Yet, most studies consider supply-side and demand-side management strategies separately, water conservation efforts are mainly driven by policy requirements, and publicly available data to assess the effectiveness of these policies is often hard to find and unstructured. Here we present CaRDS – the statewide California Residential water Demand and Supply open dataset. CaRDS encompasses eight years (2013-2021) of monthly water supply and demand time series for 404 water suppliers in California, USA. Access to detailed temporal and spatial water supply and demand operations at the state-level can be useful to researchers and practitioners, e.g., to evaluate the effectiveness of water conservation policies and discover regional differences in water conservation measures