Delivering real-time water hazard information through human-centered design

On Memorial Day, 2015, catastrophic flooding throughout central Texas resulted in the loss of 13 lives and caused millions of dollars in damages (Furl 2018). The flooding exposed the need for water resource managers, first responders, and the public to have better real-time access to streamflow gaging stations and weather information. In 2016, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed the Texas Water Dashboard (Dashboard) to combine datasets produced by multiple agencies and display them in a single web-mapping application.