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This assessment provides a marked improvement over the previous CaDC parcel based
methodology, which was the previously best available statewide approximation publicly
available online. Those calculations are shown via an interactive tool whereby water uses can
input and analyze various policy scenarios. This tool was developed for planning and
education purposes as a public service to support the water community in navigating the
rapidly evolving statewide policy discussions.
As described in the original grant agreement with the Water Foundation, "This interactive
planning tool empowers the California water community to analyze the impact of those
prospective efficiency standards under user selected scenarios with varying indoor or outdoor
efficiency standards." The CaDC partnership does not take water policy positions as described
in the CaDC in depth principles here.
Purpose: This document details the CaDCs methodology in conducting this first assessment of
statewide efficiency targets described in Governor Browns May 2016 Executive Order on
Making Conservation a California Way of Life (EO).1 The key excerpt from the EO is copied
below:
These water use targets shall be customized to the unique conditions of each water
agency, shall generate more statewide water conservation than existing requirements,
and shall be based on strengthened standards for:
This high level executive order is further specified in the report from the Department of Water
Resources (DWR) and State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB).2 This CaDC
1
https://www.gov.ca.gov/docs/5.9.16_Attested_Drought_Order.pdf
2
http://www.water.ca.gov/wateruseefficiency/conservation/docs/EO_B-37-16_Report.pdf
This initial deployment of the CaDC Efficiency Explorer focuses on residential indoor and
residential outdoor water use to set an initial target. The CaDC Efficiency Explorer tool
incorporates this target calculation for any user-selected time period.
Note the efficiency explorer shows only data for the dates available from the supplier report.
For instance, if a supplier did not report in July through September of 2016, if the user selects
that time period, that supplier will be omitted from the tool display.
In each user-defined scenario, the aggregate statewide residential target for the previous twelve
months is shown against the existing SBx7-7 target and the total residential usage for that same
period.3
This section of the methodology documentation details those calculations along with
opportunities for improvement in all four standards in the Governors Executive Order.4 Section
2 explains how this calculation is aligned with publicly available water production and use data.
This first assessment calculates the residential indoor water use budget for each month as
=
where
is the population data reported to the state in the monthly supplier report
is the residential indoor standard, representing the gallons per person per day
allocated for reasonable, efficient indoor use
is the number of days in the reporting period
There exist unique local circumstances that may need additional customization, such as
seasonal population shifts in high tourism areas:
Such suppliers may need additional customizations through an indoor variance
process or supplemental data collection. This variance process would need to
have the ability to deal with other local economic conditions to accurately
measure efficiency.
3
Note the SBx7-7 target is an aggregate utility wide number so that is adjusted by the percent of
residential usage for the utility service area obtained from the monthly supplier report.
4
A mathematical supplement detailing the calculation of errors associated with these water use targets is
available upon request.
The outdoor irrigation budget will be calculated for each month as follows:
= > 0.62 5
where
is the landscape area measured within the utility service area as described in section
1.B.1
> is the reference evapotranspiration, calculated for each agency and month as
described in section 1.B.2
is the outdoor standard representing a percent of measured
evapotranspiration
This water budget calculation uses landscape area and evapotranspiration data as follows.
The National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) contracts aircraft to fly states at least every
two years, making it an invaluable public resource for updating land cover classifications. The
2016 NAIP imagery is at 60 centimeter resolution, an improvement over the historical NAIP
resolution of 1 meter. The NAIP imagery provides four spectral bands including red, green, blue
and critically near infrared to enable vegetation differentiation such as irrigated turf versus
artificial turf.
This imagery has not traditionally been used in detailed landscape classification due to its
relatively coarse spatial resolution of one meter. However, improvements to the 2016 NAIPs
spatial resolution, as well as new analytical methods developed by Dr. Marx, have produced an
inexpensive and accurate way to estimate landcover across California.
Developed at the Claremont Graduate University, CILA (the California Irrigable Landscape
Algorithm) produces accurate landscape classifications derived from NAIP imagery.
Classifications include Irrigated Turf, Bushes and Trees and surfaces that would not receive a
water budget such as surfaces impervious to water (concrete, roofs), bare earth and non-
5
0.62 is the conversion between inches of ET to gallons per square foot.
Note the CaDC Efficiency Explorer tool is ultimately agnostic to landscape area data source and
could input data from future improved iterations, other statewide data sources, or local
landscape area datasets. In fact, the Efficiency Explorer tool has a neighborhood-level
counterpart that is deployed for CaDC agencies.
This initial CGU landscape area iteration measures what is indisputably included in that
landscape area calculation: photosynthetically active vegetation (PSAV) turf and PSAV trees
and shrubs. PSAV describes vegetation that actively conducting photosynthesis, or healthy,
green vegetation. That data has been generated at a parcel level statewide and aligns with the
(Draft) state landscape area categories as follows:
Brown lawns
Greenspace
covered with an
awning
Those landscape area measures are pruned to residential areas to align with available water
production data from the monthly supplier report (which measures residential production). That
is done on parcel by parcel basis using the Office of Planning and Research (OPR) residential
parcel dataset.6
Note publically available parcel polygons sometimes do not cover street medians, so that
portion of landscape area is omitted. That is an area for future improvement. Other times there
is some sort of street parcel so that the street is also covered by a polygon and there is no
"empty space" between polygons.
Those parcel-level measurements are aggregated to a retail supplier level using service area
boundaries obtained from the Department of Water Resources (DWR)7 and California
Environmental Health Tracking Program.8 Several retail service area boundaries overlap and
those issues have been passed along to the relevant DWR working group.
This section details initial efforts to evaluate the accuracy of this CGU data. One way to gauge
the accuracy of the CGU landscape area measurements is to compare them with the
measurements currently being used by CaDC member agencies employing water budget rate
structures. We do this here by comparing landscape area at the parcel level and in aggregate
for two CaDC agencies known to have measured (as opposed to estimated) landscape area:
the Moulton Niguel Water District (MNWD), and the Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD).
6
http://services.gis.ca.gov/arcgis/rest/services/Boundaries/Parcels_Residential/MapServer
7
https://gis.water.ca.gov/app/boundaries/
8
http://cehtp.org/page/water/water_system_map_viewer
In both cases, only customers with validated assessor parcel numbers (APNs) were compared.
In this case 32,180 parcels in Moulton Niguel and 30,856 in Eastern Municipal were included in
the comparison. Two mismatches complicate this direct comparison which should be
considered.
1) MNWD and EMWD are measuring a wider number of classes as irrigable to include
dead lawns, pools and some drought tolerant landscaping while the CGU method only
measures photosynthetically active turf, bushes or trees.
2) All CGU imagery is from July and August 2016, measuring landscaping in the driest
part of the year. MNWD and EMWD measurements were done as part of implementing
their water budget based rates and many of those measurements predated 2016. This
mismatch means MNWD and EMWD will include a significant amount of non-irrigated,
natural vegetation in their measurement.
Since irrigated area is a subset of irrigable area, we would expect the CGU measurements to be
smaller than those used by the agencies for each parcel. That is what we see. CaDC staff has
performed a similar accuracy assessment with leading vendors.9 Furthermore, CaDC
investigated how that error broke out by subcategory. The CGU estimates are produced as the
sum of turf area and tree/shrub area. In order to determine how each of these two components
contributes to the observed differences, a regression analysis was conducted.
The analysis found that the error is minimized by inflating the estimated turf area (by a factor of
1.1 in MNWD and 2.2 in EMWD) and decreasing the estimated tree/shrub area (by a factor of
0.89 in MNWD and 0.94 in EMWD). This further aligns with the intuition that an aerial algorithm
for estimating PSAV would under-predict turf by excluding areas of brown lawn, and over-
predict tree/shrub by including tree area that covers impermeable surfaces.
Certain areas of the state are more technically challenging. Remote sensing can be
used to flag challenging areas that need special attention.
Multiple images over different time periods can help disambiguate those areas.
Use human experts to manually inspect ambiguous areas and reconcile what
specific category the area falls into.
Implement a variance process to procedurally provide allowances in areas that are
challenging to any aerial imaging measurement -- automated or manual.
9
CaDC Independent Landscape Area Classification Accuracy Assessment (September 2016). Please
inquire with CaDC staff for a copy.
The other key data point for assigning an outdoor water budget is evapotranspiration. This first
iteration uses the inverse distance-weighted average of evapotranspiration data from the 10
CIMIS stations nearest to each utility service area. Specifically, the > for a given utility and
month is calculated as:
I> I>
> = JKI J >J / JKI J
J = 1/J
where
>J is the reference evapotranspiration measured at CIMIS station
J = 1 if CIMIS station is within the utility boundary and if the station is outside the
station boundary J is the euclidean distance from station to the centroid of the utility
service area
A small number of the daily ET readings are missing values. The missing readings for each
station are estimated as the daily average for that station and month.
In this approach, the > for utilities is calculated as the weighted average of readings from
nearby stations, with more weight given to those nearby and less weight given to more distant
stations. The approach is imperfect as evapotranspiration can vary greatly across a service area
(which a single number will not reflect) and some service areas will be far from a CIMIS station.
This speaks to the importance of 1) calculating the outdoor water budgets for statewide
efficiency targets at a parcel level and 2) having more geographically granular measurements of
ET.
In October 2013, the DWR CII Task force produced a report for the California State Legislature
recommending the following:11
In line with those recommendations on the need for granular, water-centric customer categories,
CaDC staff has developed a unique applied R&D project with NYU CUSP. Working with
Professor Constantine Kontokosta of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress, the CaDC
is working towards benchmarking efficient water use across Commercial, Industrial, Institutional
and Multifamily Residential customer classes using our standardized data. This approach has
been deployed by CaDC staff when they were part of Professor Kontokostas research group for
NYC, resulting in a Bloomberg Data for Good award-winning Energy & Water Performance
Map12 and associated journal paper.13 These approaches to classify and resolve commercial
10
https://github.com/California-Data-Collaborative/Evapotranspiration
11
http://www.water.ca.gov/legislation/docs/CII%20Volume%20II%20july%202014.pdf
12
http://www1.nyc.gov/site/sustainability/codes/energy-benchmarking.page
13
http://cusp.nyu.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/D4GX_Web_Based_Visualization_and_Predction_Kontokosta_Tull.pdf
Integrated, nonprofit water data infrastructure can help use statistical outlier detection to flag
anomalies and find areas for leak detection. Monthly metered use data needs to be
supplemented with SCADA flow data to detect leaks effectively. The underlying parsing and
SCUBA data infrastructure can be redeployed to integrate that SCADA flow data.
California collects three publicly available sets of major statewide aggregate urban water use
data. Those sources temporal frequency and key data fields are summarized below.
These urban water demand data sources each present challenges in aligning with the water use
target methodology detailed in Section 1. Note none of these aggregate water use data sources
explicitly break out indoor residential use and total outdoor water use.
Current California water reported data will need to be improved to implement the EO long term
framework. For instance mapping dedicated commercial areas with overlapping parcels and
meters will be key for distinguishing outdoor from indoor CII. In addition, outdoor water budgets
can be more accurately assigned at the parcel level as detailed in section 1.B.2 as
evapotranspiration can vary greatly across a utilitys service area. This meter level approach
would also better account for unique local circumstances like recycled water delivered to
residential accounts. Lastly, an integrated database of metered water utility helps streamline the
deployment of analytics to support water managers in meeting their targets and broader water
reliability objectives.The CaDC partnership has developed data infrastructure integrating
metered use data across participating agencies. Participation in the project is voluntary.
The CaDC has the tools to ingest meter data mapped to addresses which can spatially identify
and rectify many of the issues noted by distinguishing between for instance commercial and
residential parcels. This tool provides an initial exploration to identify opportunities for mapping
measures of efficiency to water agencies and accounting for local conditions. A combination of
better data, consistent metadata and standard definitions are critical to provide an accurate
measure of efficiency. This data integration is exactly what the CaDCs SCUBA data
infrastructure delivers.
This integrated and standardized metered use data provides multiple benefits which you can
learn about on the CaDC website here: CaliforniaDataCollaborative.com/analytics
Additionally, CaDC staff is actively working to improve other data quality aspects that will be
critical to the effective implementation of this framework:
14
https://github.com/California-Data-Collaborative/Evapotranspiration
15
http://cehtp.org/faq/water/water_boundary_tool_data_user_frequently_asked_questions
16
https://california-data-collaborative.carto.com/builder/45fc9a00-08ff-11e7-87a6-
0e05a8b3e3d7/embed?state=%7B%22map%22%3A%7B%22ne%22%3A%5B33.137551192346145%2
C-125.36499023437501%5D%2C%22sw%22%3A%5B38.70265930723801%2C-
112.6318359375%5D%2C%22center%22%3A%5B35.96911507577482%2C-
118.99841308593751%5D%2C%22zoom%22%3A7%7D%7D