New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting — Abstracts

To address the challenges of climate change, water managers and researchers require robust datasets, and tools to evaluate that data. The New Mexico Water Data Act was passed in 2019 with the goal of making a wide range of water data more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) for the state of New Mexico.

Significant advancements have been made in water data accessibility since 2019. State agencies participating in the Water Data Act are increasingly providing greater access to digital water data, website improvements and developing application programming interfaces (APIs) that serve their water data online. However, a crucial challenge remains in the interoperability of datasets. To help address this issue, the Water Data Initiative (WDI) team at the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources has embarked on a project to integrate data from multiple sources, focusing initially on groundwater levels for hydrologic research.

The WDI team has developed essential data infrastructure, a "data pipeline," which helps automate, integrate and format multiple data sources provided through APIs. Via the data pipeline, these datasets are then made accessible to any data sharing application, such as a dashboard or web map. The existence of the data pipeline has enabled the development of two other applications focused on data integration.

The Data Integration Engine is a python tool which queries multiple water data services and provides unified datasets. Using a command line interface, users can currently query different water data sources for unified water level and water quality data. Outputs include both a ‘summary’ output that summarizes measurement data available for locations, and a detailed ‘time-series’ output that provides all historical measurements for individual locations. The data integration engine tool significantly reduces the work required for hydrologic research by allowing uses to write one query to review data from multiple sources in a unified .csv file, where previously they would have had to go to each source individually, download the data, and unify the datasets themselves.

The WDI team is also developing a user-friendly map tool, Weaver, to view multiple groundwater datasets using a single interface. The Weaver groundwater map currently displays 10 data layers from federal, state, and local sources. Individual locations can be selected to display a hydrograph. The addition of filters to view groundwater data by county, measurement device, and well depth is in active development. Future work on Weaver will focus on the ability to download integrated data as the front end of the data integration engine, and will expand to include other water data sources, such as water quality or surface water data.