A Dataset for Research on Water Sustainability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive dataset on water usage in cooling systems and electricity generation across U.S. regions, enabling research on water sustainability and efficiency improvements.

Contribution

The authors provide a new publicly available dataset with hourly water efficiency data and cooling system models, addressing data scarcity in water sustainability research.

Findings

Dataset covers 2019-2023 for major U.S. regions.

Includes models linking weather to water efficiency.

Preliminary analysis demonstrates dataset's potential applications.

Abstract

Freshwater scarcity is a global problem that requires collective efforts across all industry sectors. Nevertheless, a lack of access to operational water footprint data bars many applications from exploring optimization opportunities hidden within the temporal and spatial variations. To break this barrier into research in water sustainability, we build a dataset for operation direct water usage in the cooling systems and indirect water embedded in electricity generation. Our dataset consists of the hourly water efficiency of major U.S. cities and states from 2019 to 2023. We also offer cooling system models that capture the impact of weather on water efficiency. We present a preliminary analysis of our dataset and discuss three potential applications that can benefit from it. Our dataset is publicly available at Open Science Framework (OSF)