Research dates: 2012-2015
Investigator(s): Kevin Robbins, Hal Needham, David Sathiaraj, Mark Shafer, Margret Boone
During the Southern Plains drought, meetings with drought managers and planners at regional drought assessment forums and during drought management webinars revealed that numerous user groups desire easily accessible information describing current and historical reservoir levels across the region. Unfortunately, reservoir level information is housed in many disparate places and managed by a number of agencies, including the US Army Corps of Engineers, US Bureau of Reclamation, river basin management authorities, and others. As a result, the region was lacking a unified source of accessible reservoir data. Many websites that provide reservoir status lacked historical data, or at least an easy, visual way to compare across time.The Water Reservoir Data Visualization Tool was publicly released on October 26, 2015, and can be found on the Data Tools page of our website. New reservoirs are being added, and data is updated as needed.