CaRDS - the statewide California Residential water Demand and Supply open dataset

Abstract

As water scarcity becomes the new norm in the Western United States, states such as California have increased their efforts to improve water resilience. Achieving water security under climate change, population growth, and urbanization requires an integrated multi-sectoral approach, where adaptation strategies combine supply and demand management interventions. Yet, most studies consider supply-side and demand-side management strategies separately. Water conservation efforts are mainly driven by policy requirements and publicly available data to assess the effectiveness of demand- and supply-side management policies is often hard to find and unstructured. Here we present CaRDS - the statewide California Residential water Demand and Supply open dataset. CaRDS encompasses nine years (2013-2021) of monthly water supply and demand time series for 404 water suppliers in California, USA, compiled from different open-access data sources. Access to detailed temporal and spatial water supply operations and demands at the state-level can be useful to researchers and practitioners to realize applications such as evaluating the effectiveness of water conservation policies and discovering regional differences in water resilience measures.