Advisory Committee on Water Information Aug2014

The federal Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI) met August 19-20, 2014 in Reston, VA. Sue Lowry represents ICWP on ACWI and Peter Evans is our alternate representative. Both Sue and Peter were able to attend both days of meetings. More info on ACWI and background documents, PowerPoints, etc. can be found on their website: www.acwi.gov

Much of the agenda was structured around the reports of various Sub-committees which do the bulk of the work related to ACWI mission during the year. These sub-committees generally have both a federal and non-federal Chair. In this short report, we have tried to highlight the actions taken or opportunities for participation that may be of most interest to ICWP members.

Subcommittee on Hydrology (SOH):
The SOH has been working on updating the federal Bulletin 17B on guidelines for Hydrologic Frequency Analysis. The draft Bulletin 17C should be out and open for public comment by December 2014.

A conference dedicated to sediment transport and water modeling will be hosted by the SOH in Reno, NV on April 19-23, 2015. The SOH hopes to spend more time on the application of data collected via satellite for water runoff forecasting and other water resource applications.

Open Water Data Initiative:
Asst. Secretary Ann Castle introduced this topic and asked that the ACWI resurrect the Sub-committee on Spatial Water Data. New non-federal participants are being recruited, particularly those with modeling, water database management or water related geo-database GIS expertise.

Shrinking Budget Report to Sec. Castle:
Peter along with John Wells did an outstanding job of presenting the guiding principles and recommendations from the report. One area the group felt needed continued attention is how we portray the relevance and importance of basic water data collection to decision makers and to those not directly in the water resources business.

Groundwater Monitoring Network:
The ACWI Subcommittee on Groundwater developed a design for a National GW Monitoring Network several years ago, which the ACWI approved and Congress authorized, and several pilot projects have gone very well. Congress has not provided funding yet, so the initial implementation has been slow, and the Subcommittee proposed a revision of the management structure, which ACWI approved at this meeting.

National Water Quality Monitoring Council
The 9th NWQMC meeting was held in Cincinnati on April 28-May 2, 2014 with about 650 attending. The 10th meeting is being planned for Tampa, FL in 2016. This subcommittee is very active and updates on their myriad functions can be found at http://acwi.gov/monitoring/conference/2014/SueLowry