The mission of WRD is to provide reliable, impartial, timely information that is needed to understand the Nation’s water resources.

Advances in technology, such as instrumentation and models, will enhance our ability to detect, analyze, and disseminate solutions to water-resource problems. Improvements in measurement of stream flow in real time and improvements in models for decisionmakers will demand the highest degree of reliability and availability of those data.

Internet and other advances in communication make it possible to disseminate hydrologic and other scientific information to both the scientific community and the general public instantly and inexpensively.

1. Demand for timely information.

2. Increasing interest from the public.

We will make short-term (2-5 years) investments in technology and  methodology to improve current capability.

Priority Water-Resource Issues

• Develop tools necessary to manage watersheds effectively as the complex systems that they truly are. Populate a quality-assured, user-friendly geographic information data base that contains coverages relevant to the understanding and
management of water resources.

Issue 6. Hydrologic hazards

Better warning systems to monitor development of hazardous events as they occur, and to take action to minimize the effects of future hazardous events.

• The entire system for delivery of stage and streamflow data will be made more reliable. We will take measures to ensure that critical data are delivered on a real-time basis 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, especially during floods and other adverse conditions.

• Develop a near real-time flood-warning system that will identify areas at risk by using watershed-based hydrologic, hydraulic, and digital-elevation models.

Issue 8. Surface-water and ground-water interactions as related to water-resource management

• Improve tools for simulating interactions between ground water and surface water to quantify the effects of human activity.

Issue 9. Hydrologic-system management, including optimization of ground-water and surface-water use.

• These models must be capable of showing the consequences of various water-management decisions over a wide range of hydrologic and climatic
conditions.

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• Collecting, quality assuring, storing, and disseminating basic hydrologic data on the quantity and quality of water.

• Developing new methods for acquiring water-resources information, including methods of data collection, quality assurance, data management, laboratory analysis, data analysis, and simulation modeling.

• Our goal is to provide high-quality data from the streamflow monitoring network at all times.

• Switch our manner of providing streamflow data from being primarily daily average flows at specific gage locations to being continuous time series of flow data.

• Simplifying and streamlining records computation in the office are potential means of reducing cost. USGS ground-water data will be more accessible over the Internet. This accessibility will provide an efficient and ready source of ground-water data to agencies and private consultants who need such information on a day-to-day basis.

• USGS water-use information will be more accessible over the Internet.

• WRD will work with DOI, OMB, and Congress to seek opportunities to increase the ground-water and surface-water assessment and modeling components of its program mix.

• Develop a new generation of computer models to simulate (a) watershed-scale responses to climate and land-use changes; (b) open-channel surface-water flow; (c) the interaction of ground water and surface water, including lakes, streams, and wetlands; (d) water chemistry and sediment transport; and (3) water-use models.
These models will be linked with decision-support systems for science-based water-management decisions. The models will be designed to become the models of choice for the scientific community.

• Connect all of our core hydrologic models to graphical user interfaces and scientific visualization software. Scientific core of these models will be coded to maximize portability across computer platforms and remain cleanly separable from the preprocessing and postprocessing software, which is expected to be commercial software.

• WRD data should be easily accessible to other organizations and the general public

• The primary means of access to the data for all users other than those that are directly involved in creating the data will be through the Internet. Use of the Internet ensures that the access systems will be virtually independent of the user’s computer platform or operating system.

• Data retrievals for multiple States should be as simple as retrievals from single-States. Users should not have to navigate among a set of USGS servers to find the data they need.

• There should be only one official site for any data value or set. However, release of copies of specialized subsets of the whole data base through the Internet or a CD-ROM is encouraged provided that the metadata associated with the data set contains a disclaimer that explains when the data were copied from the official files.

• Users should have access to the full information content of WRD monitoring data sets. Users should be able to reproduce the continuous record from a monitoring station except for those periods when the daily values are estimated because of ice or other anomalous conditions.

• The system should comply with the minimum data elements as defined by the Intergovernmental Task Force on Monitoring and comply with data exchange or metadata requirements of the Federal Geographic Data Committee. This compliance should ensure the ability to import and export data between the WRD system and other data systems.

• WRD will control entry of data into its data base and will make the decision to enter other agency data on the basis of direct knowledge of the methods and quality assurances used by the data producer. We will vigorously promote the use of our data-base software by other data producers with a goal of making it easy to access the producer’s data.

• Continue to use emerging technologies to improve the delivery of products to high-priority users.

• WRD will reduce the time it takes to produce quality reports. We live in an information age, and we must get reports out to our customers much sooner.

• USGS will provide the capability, through the Internet, for anyone with Internet access to obtain real-time streamflow, ground-water levels, and water-quality characteristics from monitoring stations that are equipped with appropriate telemetry. We also will provide the capability for obtaining long-term hydrologic characteristics from locations with historical data and estimates of hydrologic
characteristics from any other location in the Nation.

• Within 2 years, WRD will develop and adopt prescribed formats that will be used by every district to serve selected hydrologic information over the Internet.

• A National Aquifer digital Data Base available on the Internet that will provide information and digital coverages for the Nation’s principal regional aquifer systems.

• Our primary focus will be to get information into the hands of those who manage and regulate the Nation’s water resources.

• Over time, permanent staff gain both general hydrologic knowledge and detailed knowledge of specific hydrologic systems that is extremely valuable to WRD and its cooperators. Further, the costs associated with constantly training a large number of other than permanent employees would be prohibitive and inconsistent with prudent resource management. It is also prudent, however, to supplement the permanent workforce with other than permanent staff that will provide flexibility and some of the new skills needed to address emerging water-resource
issues.

• A goal for WRD is that all employees in the division will be able to do their jobs at the state of the art in their field and at the highest possible level of quality. Clearly, training to enhance the skills of WRD personnel is one approach to achieving this level of excellence.

• Increase the use of advanced educational technology to facilitate distance learning through classes on the Internet and other computer-aided techniques.

• Examples of the kinds of situations where AWP might be appropriate include working with colleagues at a university of cooperator facility, analyzing data or writing a report at a library or at home, or working at a site away from the office during periods when injury or illness restrict an employee’s ability to travel to the office.

• Interpret and analyze data in our national water data bases to accomplish information-synthesis objectives.

• To the extent possible, use commercially available software and contractor support for data-base development.

Evolution of Ongoing Scientific Programs

Long-Term Data Collection

• National scope, with associated economies of scale, including the infrastructure to support high-quality data collection and to manage and disseminate those data.

• Accurate and unbiased data and information products that are derived from ongoing evaluations of the hydrologic data base.

Research and Development

• Improved communication will lead to a common understanding of the WRD’s research capabilities and the needs of the operational program, which will influence the directions of research.

Investments in New Capabilities

• WRD will make significant investments to improve hydrologic models, data-base software, and information dissemination.

Data-Base Software

The goals for WRD data-management systems are to (1) eliminate any duplication of data-entry activities, (2) automate data transfer as much as possible, (3) provide powerful and easy-to-use tools for data-processing and data-quality control, and (4) provide tools to easily retrieve data in the volumes and formats that are useful to USGS employees, cooperators, and the general public.

Principles for development of a national water-information data base for WRD are as follows:

• To the extent possible, use commercially available software and contractor support
  for data-base development.
  
• WRD data should be easily accessible to other organizations and the general public.

• The primary means of access to the data for all users other than those that are directly
  involved in creating the data will be through the Internet. Use of the Internet ensures
  that the access systems will be virtually independent of the user's computer platform or
  operating system.

• Data retrievals for multiple States should be as simple as retrievals from single-States.
  Users should not have to navigate among a set of USGS servers to find the data they
  need.

• There should be only one official site for any data value or set. However, release of
  copies of specialized subsets of the whole data base through the Internet or a CD-
  ROM is encouraged provided that the metadata associated with the data set contains a
  disclaimer that explains when the data were copied from the official files.

• Users should have access to the full information content of WRD monitoring data sets.
  Users should be able to reproduce the continuous record from a monitoring station
  except for those periods when the daily values are estimated because of ice or other
  anomalous conditions.

• The system should comply with the minimum data elements as defined by the
  Intergovernmental Task Force on Monitoring and comply with data exchange or
  metadata requirements of the Federal Geographic Data Committee. This compliance
  should ensure the ability to import and export data between the WRD system and
  other data systems.

• WRD will control entry of data into its data base and will make the decision to
  enter other agency data on the basis of direct knowledge of the methods and
  quality assurances used by the data producer. We will vigorously promote the
  use of our data-base software by other data producers with a goal of making it
  easy to access the producer’s data.