Climate Information Management Toolkit

The SBIR solicitation expressed the need for tools to process data from disparate sources in various formats and generate drought-relevant data products. NIDIS also recognizes a need to span organizational boundaries to provide access to integrated drought information for use in water management. The Phase I SBIR project resulted in prototype Climate Information Management Toolkit (CIMT) software that automates data collection, processing, and product generation. Phase II will focus on enhancing the prototype CIMT to a production level suitable for application by local water organizations and NIDIS. Riverside’s relationship with local, regional, and state organizations in Colorado allows for a bottom-up application of these tools, while coordinating with NIDIS pilot projects and agency efforts to meet national goals. Specific tasks include: improved implementation of existing web services, enabling new web services for important local data sets, implementing tools to compute water supply indices and triggers, and enhancing tools to consider climate change in data products. Stakeholders in the water community will have access to these tools, which can be integrated with the NIDIS Drought Portal. Riverside’s track-record with stakeholders, technical expertise, and ability to integrate with ongoing efforts provides an opportunity to demonstrate NIDIS efforts at the local level.