Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2017GU311B

Annual trend reporting, and maintenance and development of the GHS/WERI water resources database

Institute: Guam
Year Established: 2017 Start Date: 2017-03-01 End Date: 2018-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $7,942 Total Non-Federal Funds: Not available

Principal Investigators: Nathan Habana, John Jenson

Project Summary: Problem: Guam Public Law 24-247 (the Guam Hydrological Survey mandate) requires that WERI: 1. Compile hydrologic data for Guam and maintain an accessible, up-to-date database; 2. Establish agency contacts to maintain a permanent flow of new data to the database; 3. Conduct analyses and publish annual reports on water use, trends and key concerns for use by the governor, legislature, public agencies and private businesses, and citizens. Consistent with this mandate, the most recent annual meeting of WERI’s Guam Advisory Council, on 10 November 2016, identified several critical needs in water resources research, education, and training that call for new updates and additional development of the database. As recognized by the Advisory Council, an up-to-date database of basic information is essential for effective research, education, and decision making for sustainable management of Guam’s water resources. There is thus a recognized ongoing need to maintain, update, and improve the database to provide researchers, managers, and professionals in Guam’s public and private sectors with reliable, baseline, historical, and current data on Guam’s water resources. This year’s update and expansion of the database will support each of the specific needs identified above, as well as separate related research and educational projects. There is also an increasingly urgent need to begin delivering annual trend reports, as the region heads into an epic El Nino event and progress continues toward the planned military buildup. Methods: The work will be done in WERI’s existing hydrology computing laboratory in the WERI main building and in the Meteorological and Hydrogeological Laboratory at House 5 on Dean’s Circle. Computing resources to be utilized are the expansion of the WERI website under GHS to include pertinent hydrologic literature library, organized collection of raw data, data analysis and interpretation, sustainable management annual reports, link to HydroGuam.net, and an online access (www.guamhydrologicsurvey.com) to the Northern Guam Lens Aquifer Database as described in WERI Technical Report #141. Student research assistants will support data entry and processing under the supervision of the WERI GHS Research Associate and principal investigator. Objectives: This is an ongoing project, with the objectives of meeting standard basic research and educational needs, particularly those identified by WERI’s Guam Advisory Council meetings and Groundwater Research Development Group, thus providing basic and essential support for all statistical, geospatial, and modeling studies of Guam’s water resources. It is complementary to the National Water Resources Database maintained by the USGS, which contains the data collected from all stations serviced by the USGS, including the rain and stream gages, and groundwater observation wells maintained on Guam under the Comprehensive Water Monitoring Program (Public Law 24-161).