In response to a directive from Congress, this report describes concepts for a national assessment of freshwater availability and use. The assessment would develop and report on indicators of the status and trends in storage volumes, flow rates, and uses of water nationwide. Currently, this information is not available in an up-to-date, nationally comprehensive and integrated form. The development and reporting of national indicators of water availability and use would be analogous to the task of other Federal statistical programs that produce and regularly update indicator variables that describe economic, demographic, and health conditions of the Nation. The effort to develop indicators should comply with the Office of Management and Budget Information Quality Guidelines. The assessment also would provide regional information on recharge, evapotranspiration, interbasin transfers, and other components of the water cycle across the country. This regional information would support analyses of water availability that are undertaken by many agencies nationwide and would benefit research quantifying variability and changes in the national and global water cycle.
The assessment would use basic hydrologic data collected by the USGS and by others to create the indicator variables. This process of computing indicators from the basic data would help to elucidate uncertainties in our knowledge of the Nation’s hydrologic conditions. Data gaps identified by the program would provide useful feedback to the design of the data-collection networks. Thus, the assessment should influence basic-data programs by showing where uncertainty is greatest. Improved networks for the collection of surface-water and ground-water data are defined by USGS plans for the National Streamflow Information Program (U.S. Geological Survey, 1998a and 1999) and the Ground-Water Resources Program (U.S. Geological Survey, 1998b), and as part of the Cooperative Water Program. Water-use information developed by the program would expand upon and strengthen existing water-use efforts along the lines suggested by the National Research Council (2002).
The timeframe over which the indicators could become available would vary with the type of indicator. Surface-water indicators could be developed in a preliminary way over about a year’s time. A year or more would be required to inventory existing data relevant to ground-water indicators and to determine appropriate ways to synthesize these data prior to development of the indicators. Several years would be required to develop improved approaches for estimating the water-use indicators prior to their implementation. The estimation of water-cycle components could be done in a stepwise basis over multiple years, depending on the scale of the effort.
The assessment should be highly collaborative, involving many Federal and State agencies, universities, and non-governmental interests. Collaboration across agency boundaries would ensure that information produced by the assessment could be aggregated with other types of physical, social, economic, and environmental data that affect water availability. These data include water-quality conditions, population statistics, land uses, water costs and pricing, climate data, and instream-flow requirements for aquatic habitats. To maximize the utility of the information, the design and development of the assessment should be coordinated through the Federal Advisory Committee on Water Information.
U.S. Geological Survey contributors to this report included Robert M. Hirsch, William M. Alley, Paul M. Barlow, Michael D. Dettinger, W. Scott Gain, Pixie A. Hamilton, Susan S. Hutson, William H. Kirby, Leonard F. Konikow, Stanley A. Leake, Harry F. Lins, Molly A. Maupin, John E. Schefter, Gregory E. Schwarz, James R. Slack, and Gregg J. Wiche. Joy Monson and Margo VanAlstine prepared the final manuscript and illustrations.
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