On the eve of the White House Water Summit

From On the Waterfront

References to The Manhattan Project ( for example, "We need a new Manhattan Project" to address fill in the blank)  are overdone. But we need something on the order of something to deal with water. California knows what it is like to live with this life blood threatened – Israel too. It is good cast attention on it – and that might happen to some extent this week as The White House Water Summit takes place.

One of the issues that must be addressed is data about water. It is not as good as data on oil, or stocks, but it should be. In the New York Times op-ed column Charles Fishman writes about water and data, and how weak efforts are to categorize, detail and report on water use.  

Imagine if NOAA only reported on weather every fifth day. That is analogous to the water reports of the U.S. government, according to Fishman, who says, where water is concerned, we spend five years rolling up a report on a single year. The biggest problem, says Fishman, is water's invisibility, here and globally.

He focused on the fact that water census is done only every five years - that gives us only 20% view of the total water experience. He points to Flint, Toledo, the Colorado basin as recent water crises and notes that adequately monitoring the water doesn't assure results, but that inadequately monitoring the water is criminal what with so much monitoring of Wall Street, Twitter Tweets or auto traffic. Any call for more monitoring of course is up against today's version of the 1800's Know-Nothing movement.

Fishman tells us that good information does three things: 1- it creates demand for more information; 2- it changes people's behavior; and, 3- it ignites innovation.

But what is next? My little look-see into this area uncovered an overabundance of data formats for representing data. It seems a first step for water data improvements might come with the application of  modern big data technology to the problem of multiple formats.

Remember the Beachboys: "In an ocean or/in a glass/ cool water is such a gas."

Related
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/opinion/the-water-data-drought.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/opinion/our-water-systemwhat-a-waste.html