How Smart Water Makes Cities More Transparent
The city of Virginia Beach turned to smart water technology so it could have better information for emergency management. The coastal city, which is hit often by hurricanes and other storms and is planning for sea level rise, wanted to know more about its water levels.
“Observational data is important,” says Sridhar Katragadda, lead data scientist for the city. “There was no water observation that could give us the water levels in streams in real time.”
Virginia Beach started deploying smart water sensors in 2015, using them for StormSense, which was developed with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. It’s a forecasting project that uses street-level hydrodynamic modeling, data from sensors and crowdsourced data collected after floods. It allows city officials to predict floods from storm surges, rain and tides up to 36 hours in advance. StormSense won the best practices category in AWS’ 2017 City on a Cloud challenge.
Katragadda says they started with 10 water level sensors in 2015. There are now more 40 installed in Virginia coastal cities through a cooperative agreement. StormSense also uses data from more than 25 sensors from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey.
In the future, Katragadda says, the city’s smart water program will be ingrained into the lives of its citizens. “This will be part of their daily routine, asking, ‘What is the water level in my neighborhood and how high?’”
The government of Ann Arbor, Mich., uses real-time smart water technology. The city worked with the University of Michigan to develop Open Storm, a package of open-source sensors, hardware and algorithms to measure and control stormwater. Sensor nodes collect data on water flow and quality, then transmit it via a cellular network. It gives a real-time, instant snapshot of water conditions.
As part of the project, student volunteers installed valves on city water systems to open and close after a storm. After flooding, the city can choose to release or throttle the water via remote control valves.
“It’s nice to know what’s happening in real time and have it precisely measured,” Harry Sheehan, chief deputy water resources commissioner for Washtenaw County, Mich., said last year at the Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo.
Water Foundry’s Sarni says smart cities that want to use smart water technologies should look to California, which is leading the way. The state’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act requires “governments and water agencies of high and medium priority basins to halt overdraft and bring groundwater basins into balanced levels of pumping and recharge,” according to the California Department of Water Resources.
Under this law, critically overdrafted basins should reach sustainability by 2040, and high- and medium-priority basins by 2042.
