Every year, the State of California gathers data about water usage and production from all of its public water systems via Electronics Annual Reports (EARs). For instance, consider Dataset #8 in the Recommended Challenge Datasets: this dataset lists information taken from the EAR for each public water system (PWS) for each month of the year, including water production/delivery, water quality, and rates. In principle, this dataset is a treasure-trove of knowledge for government employees seeking to study, optimize, and understand water distribution in California.

Despite the effort expended to gather this data, it rarely gets used in analyses. Even though the dataset contains valuable insight about water use, its clunky format makes even simple analysis questions (e.g. how does water production change in a particular PWS over time?) difficult to ask. Furthermore, the low data quality (e.g. missing fields) provides other obstacles.

This repository includes Jupyter Python notebooks to address both the format and quality problems in the EAR dataset. We intend the users of this repository to be state and local government employees (or perhaps simply interested citizens) who wish to understand how, when, and where water is used in California.