Compilation of surface water diversion sites and daily withdrawals for the Upper Colorado River Basin, 1980-2022

This data release contains an inventory of 1,358 major surface water diversion structures with associated daily time series withdrawal records (1980-2022) for structures within the Upper Colorado River and Little Colorado River Basins. Diversion structures were included in this dataset if they were determined to have the capacity to divert water at rates greater than 10 cubic feet per second. Since those river basins encompasses portions of five states, water use data are dispersed among numerous federal and state agency databases and there is no centralized dataset that documents surface water use within the entire UCOL at a fine spatial and temporal resolution. Diversion structures and locations were identified from a mix of state reports, maps, and satellite imagery. A Python script was developed to automate retrieval of daily time series withdrawal records from multiple state and federal databases. The script was also used to process, filter, and harmonize the diversion records to remove outlier values and estimate missing data. The original withdrawal data, the processed datasets, and the Python script are included in this data release.