When water use in Arlington started to skyrocket last summer and then plummet during the wet fall months, data from Arlington Water Utilities illustrated those trends. Now, Arlington residents and others can access and explore that information online through the City’s increasingly robust Open Arlington portal.
Starting this month, a downloadable data set on the portal will show the change in water use from month to month and year to year for each Arlington ZIP code. For example, the latest data shows that water usage in January 2019 in the 76002 ZIP code in south Arlington was down by 12.2 percent when compared to December 2018. Similarly, January 2019 usage in the 76002 area was down by 8.6 percent when compared to January 2018.
This information can also be compared to weather records, such as precipitation levels, to demonstrate how weather affects water use in the city. For example, National Weather Service precipitation totals in January 2019 were almost twice what they were in January 2018, when water usage was higher.
The City of Arlington, which adopted an Open Data Policy in October 2017, is invested in enabling the community to use data via its Ask Arlington app and the Open Arlington portal. A variety of searchable data, such as water use by ZIP code, is available to the public through the Open Arlington portal. Other recently added data sets include information about the city’s libraries, hospitals and Lake Arlington.
The regularly updated data set, as well as a shapefile showing each ZIP code area of the City, is available at https://data-arlingtontx.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/water-usage-by-zip-code. Users can click on the shaded ZIP code area for data or download a report.
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