New Dashboards Equip Kansas Leaders with Disaster Recovery and Water Data
As weather events become more extreme and frequent, local leaders need easy to comprehend data to safeguard their communities. But disaster recovery information is scattered across federal and state websites, which makes it difficult to analyze and interpret.
To solve this challenge, a University of Kansas research team created a public-facing website known as the Kansas Extreme Events dashboard. This new tool is the fourth in a suite of dashboards to streamline data-driven decision-making across the state.
The Extreme Events dashboard acts like a speedometer in a car—but instead of depicting speed it gauges how various storms impact Kansans. By compiling federal assistance records and other data, it tracks those individuals and public entities receiving disaster assistance, shows the types of recovery projects that get funded, and provides demographic details, allowing users to compare how storms affect different counties.
Taming “Messy” Data
The data now powering the dashboard was previously siloed in separate public datasets like Open FEMA, PRISM (Oregon State University), and the Kansas Geological Survey. Bringing together these sources proved to be a significant undertaking.
“If you go through their website, it’s a lot to take in,” said Jash Patel, a KU graduate student who built the cyber infrastructure for the Extreme Events Dashboard. Patel, whose work focused on wrestling the data into a usable format, noted that the PRISM project was particularly large. “It took me three or four weeks to finalize which datasets I needed to work with. I had to do a lot of data wrangling.”
Project lead William Duncan, an assistant research professor of data science at KU, echoed the challenge. "The data is complicated,” Duncan agreed. “It's not like getting an Excel file. All of the data has to be constructed because none of it was created with the purpose of this kind of analysis."
Policy and Impact
The Extreme Events dashboard is the fourth such tool created by the team to support the State of Kansas Water Plan. Each dashboard helps users grasp issues such as drought severity, aquifer depletion, reservoir health, disaster recovery, and infrastructure resilience.
Policymakers, researchers, and residents can use the new dashboards to see statewide patterns. This functionality allows planners to identify counties most affected by extreme climate events, track aquifer stress, and understand federal assistance trends for longer-term planning.
Duncan has presented the work to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, Kansas Geological Survey, and the groundwater management districts. At this point, the aquifer and the water quality dashboards have had the most impact.
Student Involvement is Key
Without college students, this research would not have gotten very far. Patel is one of those students engaged to work on this project as part of the Kansas Data Science Consortium (KDSC), a key workforce initiative of the Kansas NSF EPSCoR.
“Every project we do has to have students. I mean, that's just our mission,” said Duncan. “We wanted students to be involved and part of the process.”
Duncan praised the quick work of Patel, who was hired this summer. “It's just an incredible accomplishment. From June 1st, his first day, to just a couple of weeks ago, he put all the data together.”
Benjy Jacobs, data engineer at the KDSC, manages the data pipelines and backend work across several projects. “A lot of this data is really messy when it starts out, so I’m trying to get that processed and make it usable in a way that makes sense,” he explained
The dashboards are the result of a multi-partner collaboration, leveraging a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator known as The WATER Hub, KU’s Institute for Policy and Social Research, the Kansas Data Science Consortium (KDSC), and an NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) called the ARISE project.
“Winning a competitive award from Convergence would not have been possible without the EPSCoR network,” said Duncan.
The team is currently working on an interactive weather dashboard that shows rainfall and drought patterns across Kansas for the past 30 years, with two additional dashboards in the works.
Readers can explore the Kansas Extreme Events dashboard and other resources at waterhub.ku.edu.
Related resources:
National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator
Kansas Data Science Consortium
Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas