The National Water Bank is a collaborative effort of academic (University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University), tribal (American Water Institute, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chickasaw Nation), federal (NOAA), state (Oklahoma Climatological Survey and Oklahoma Water Resources Board), and local partners (Citizens for the Protection of the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer) dedicated to developing interactive interdisciplinary partnerships between scientists and communities to design feasible water management strategies to protect and preserve vital water resources. The National Water Bank collaboration is founded on the tenet that sound hydrologic management decisions must be supported by an in-depth reliable scientific knowledge base which produces dependable, accessible, and understandable weather and water information.

Specifically, this program will demonstrate integration of high-resolution precipitation observing systems, multi-sensor precipitation estimation, and forecasting tools in a local watershed of the Arbuckle-Simpson Aquifer located in south-central Oklahoma. Program plans call for the installation of 11 monitoring sites consisting of co-located mesonet and monitoring well pairs. This will provide real-time data, as frequently as five minutes, on critical elements of the hydrologic cycle including soil moisture. The real-time observation data gathered at these monitoring sites will be augmented by leveraging existing high-resolution precipitation estimation programs, surface and streamflow networks, groundwater monitoring well programs, radar research platforms, lightning detection networks, and numerical modeling efforts currently operating in Oklahoma. The program will leverage real-time operational data collection, quality assurance/quality control, and data dissemination programs operated by National Water Bank partners to enable incorporation of this high-resolution data in ensembles of weather and water numerical models to demonstrate the linkage between watershed monitoring and prediction. The program will use existing relationships and outreach programs of National Water Bank partners to accurately assess data's value to watershed planning and hazard mitigation strategies. A comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to product evaluation, outreach, and stakeholder education will be implemented utilizing National Water Bank social scientists, outreach coordinators, and community groups. These partners will establish sustainable, highly interactive communication pathways for continuous product evaluation and information sharing between scientists, policy-makers, and water users. The effective pathways will accelerate transition of program research to operational entities and water management policy institutions.

This unique partnership between tribal, academia, federal, and state entities will implement the interdisciplinary program plan to accurately assess and understand the informational needs of water managers and users in specific local watersheds and rural communities. This collaboration will bring scientific monitoring, observing, and prediction tools to a rural watershed which serves communities whose populations are traditionally underrepresented in national science and economic development programs. In essence, this project will integrate the various scientific disciplines, associated monitoring technologies and societal stakeholders involved in the hydrologic cycle into one seamless functional group. The temporal and spatial variabilities of climatology, hydrology and hydrogeology will be investigated and correlated during the project to more accurately determine the flowpath of precipitation as it enters the next phase of the hydrologic cycle (i.e., surface water or ground water), volume of water contributed to each of these hydrologic pathways, how this translates into water "inventory" for domestic, municipal, agricultural and industrial users over time, and depending on the relationship between inventory and need, what management strategies should be emplaced to ensure sustainable stakeholder water supplies.