Compare HarDWR to WaDE

[rwjam]

Review this Harmonized Database of Western U.S. Water Rights (HarDWR) [link].
Essentially, this group got federal funding to gather water right data, which is what we do. We would like to do a comparison between their HarDWR and our WaDE / WestDAAT.

[rwjam]

After spending the morning on this, here’s a quick summary of what I’m seeing. As a whole, I think this effort is the result of a scientific community wanting to try and build useable data for modeling purposes. I believe eventually there is suppose to be a accompanying published paper with this information?

Similarities:
• A lot of the same state source native datasets (e.g., CaliforniaRights_eWRIMS, ArizonaRights_Well55Registry, IdahoRights_PointOfDiversion & IdahoRights_PlaceOfUse, and many others). Off the bat these all feel like publicly available datasets. I’m not sure if they had to reach out to the States to gain access to any of these.
• Used consistent categorization scheme that puts each water right record into one of 7 broad use categories (i.e., they organized and group the data into beneficial use categories for 7 uses. We do the same thing but at 18 beneficial uses. We also group and organize data by water source type, owner type, and site type).
• They look for similar water right attributes: priority date, CFS, (water) source, native ben use, volume (i.e., AF), legal status, location information (i.e., lat and long, what basin they tie to, etc).
• They separate out water rights into PODs and POUs.

Differences:
• No WestDAAT like service. It appears to just be a series of quality-controlled datasets from 11 different publicly available state data sets. Without the published paper I can’t tell exactly WHAT they did to perform any quality control. We break down any quality control we do and host that information on our WaDE GitHub for the public / states to find link.
• I think they only have POU data from AZ and WA (versus WaDE that has POU for WA, OR, ID, MT, WY, NV, UT, AZ, NE, OK).

Things I’m unaware of..
• Not sure how long this project has been going on / when they first received federal funding.
• Don’t have an exact count of how big a difference the size of data is between HarDWR and WaDE. I can try to produce some analytics to answer that, but I feel like that can easily be answered by sending a question to them.

[rwjam]

Adel Comments.

"Tony, after digging deeper, I this work is part of a massive project called: The Program on Coupled Human and Earth Systems (PCHES) i.e, peaches, and here is its website
https://www.pches.psu.edu/

It seems to have been funded twice
2017 PCHES-FRAME: $17 million, five-year cooperative research agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science
2021-PCHES-ADAPT: $20 million, five-year project with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
I will email the authors and see if they'd be willing to share more info and let them know about WestDAAT."