Shale Network Featured on NPR's State Impact

The Shale Network project was recently featured in a piece on NPR's State Impact with footage coming from the workshop that was held at PSU a couple weeks ago. The video, embedded below, has Dr. Sue Brantley (PI of the Shale Network) discussing their approach in creating an online database to enable research regarding the potential impacts of natural gas extraction on water in the Marcellus Shale region. I also got a few seconds on camera to do a quick plug for HIS!

The 2013 Shale Network Workshop

The Shale Network database contains data from over 22,000 sites in the Marcellus Shale Region.

Last week, I visited State College, Pennsylvania to provide HIS related support at the 2013 Shale Network Workshop. The focus of this event was to bring together a number of stakeholders in the Marcellus Shale region to investigate potential impacts of natural gas extraction on water quality and water quantity. The Shale Network group is examining this question through the development of a database of applicable data. By publishing this database in HIS, the Shale Network can examine the data alongside our other data sources (including EPA and USGS), determine possible data gaps, and use HIS tools, such as HydroDesktop, to investigate what the data can reveal to researchers in addition to policymakers. View the workshop's materials by clicking the links below:

• 2013 Shale Network Agenda
• Shale Network: Making Knowledge from Numbers: 2013 HydroDesktop Demo

The Shale Network database presently contains over 669,700 total data values from 58,133 time series measured at 22,904 different sites.

Video: Using CUAHSI HIS to Assess Water Quality and Quantity Data in Regions of Hydraulic Fracturing

Last week's cyberseminar has been posted to YouTube. In case you missed it, Dr. Sue Brantley discussed the application of HIS to the Shale Network Research Coordination Network, which is gathering water quality and quantity data in areas that could be impacted by fracking (specifically the Marcellus Shale region). Watch the full video below:

ShaleNetwork Cyberseminar - Today!

A reminder: Today, at 3 PM Eastern, Dr. Sue Brantley (Pennsylvania State University, will be presenting in the first of our Spring HIS Cyberseminars. Dr. Brantley will be discussing the ShaleNetwork, which is a Research Coordination Network funded by the National Science Foundation:

Significant public controversy has developed in response to the use of hydrofracturing especially in the northeastern states underlain by the Marcellus shale where some citizens and scientists question whether shale gas recovery will contaminate local surface and ground waters. Researchers, government agencies, and citizen scientists in Pennsylvania are teaming up to run the ShaleNetwork (www.shalenetwork.org), an NSF-funded research collaboration network that is currently finding, collating, sharing, publishing, and exploring data related to water quality and quantity in areas that are exploiting shale gas. The effort, focused initially on Pennsylvania, is developing the ShaleNetwork database, which is hosted by CUAHSI and available for public download through the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System. 

To join the Cyberseminar, follow the link and dial into the conference line listed below:

http://cuahsi.adobeconnect.com/his/ 

Conference Line: (866) 244-8528

Participant Code: 391191

Once dialed into the conference line, you will be prompted for the participant code.

Shale Network at the Rutgers' Earth and Planetary Sciences Spring Colloquium

Professor Sue Brantley, who is the Principal Investigator of the Shale Network project, will be presenting next week at Rutgers' Earth and Planetary Sciences Spring Colloquium. Professor Brantley's presentation, entitled Hydraulic Fracturing of Shales and Water Quality, will discuss how the Shale Network has gathered and analyzed water quality data in the Marcellus Shale region to examine the potential impacts of exploitation of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). The database that the Shale Network has developed is hosted by CUAHSI and the data are available in HydroDesktop through the power of HIS, which I highlighted in a previous post.

Details:

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Wright-Rieman Auditorium, Busch Campus

12:00 p.m.

HIS Around the Web...

Last week, two very cool HIS related articles came to our attention here at CUAHSI. One is in response to a National Water Quality Monitoring Council webinar delivered by Executive Director Rick Hooper; the other highlights research being conducted by the Shale Network, which is using HIS to store and analyze data. Follow the links below to check them out...

• Info system links hydrological researchers to open source data across the U.S. 

• Citizen Scientists Help the Shale Network Address Fracking Concerns

2012 in Review: Data Sources Added to the HIS Catalog

The number of data services registered in HIS continued to grow in 2012 with 26 new web services registered with the central catalog. These new services include data from university researchers, citizen science organizations, as well as federal agencies. Here are a few notable additions...

Shale Network - As I highlighted in a previous post, the Shale Network project is investigating the potential impact of natural gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale region. The database is being developed from multiple sources with multiple partners; CUAHSI is participating through hosting and helping to maintain the database as well as through providing training and support in using HIS.

Kansas State Daily Weather Data - This service, from researchers at KSU, includes daily weather data collected at 14 sites throughout the state of Kansas. The observed variables in this database include net radiation, temperature (air & soil), wind speed & direction, evapotranspiration, and precipitation.

4 New NASA Services - NASA has registered 4 new services from the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS).

• NLDAS Hourly Mosaic Data
• GLDAS 3-hourly Noah Data
• NLDAS Hourly Primary Forcing Data
• NLDAS Hourly NOAH Data

Ipswich River Watershed Association RiverWatch Program - Another service that I have previously highlighed is the IRWA RiverWatch program, which has citizen scientists collect data to monitor the health of the Ipswich River (located in Northeast Massachusetts). The observations published in HIS include dissolved oxygen and water temperature. 

Spotlight On: The Shale Network Project

Can natural gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing (also known as "fracking") and clean water coexist? This question has been subject of debate between concerned environmentalists and those who see this fracking as a promising step toward a transition away from other energy sources such as coal. Although natural gas is viewed by many as a positive alternative to coal because of costs as well as environmental impacts, questions regarding the environmental impacts of fracking still exist.

According to the EIA, natural gas generated electricity has grown dramatically over the past  two decades while production of coal and petroleum generated electricity has decreased.

One of the most active research projects currently utilizing HIS, the Shale Network, is investigating the impacts of natural gas extraction by generating knowledge about water quality and flow data in a place that has been characterized as one of the most promising sources of natural gas in the U.S., the Marcellus Shale region. The Shale Network is composed of researchers from Penn State, Pitt, Dickinson, in addition to representatives from other universities and organizations. Funded by the National Science Foundation, this project is building and maintaining a database that will, according to this NSF article, "be used to establish background concentrations of chemicals in streams and rivers, and ultimately to assess changes throughout the Marcellus Shale area."

This database, which is an aggregation of data sets from different organizations, is hosted by CUAHSI.

Data collected from Shale Network sites can be accessed in HydroDesktop

And, like other sources of data registered in HIS, data from the Shale Network project are publicly available and can be discovered using HIS clients.

Click here for more information about the Shale Network.