Hydrologic data, primarily precipitation and runoff, have been collected on experimental watersheds operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) and on other lands in southeastern Arizona since the 1950s. These data are of national and international importance and make up one of the most comprehensive semiarid watershed data sets in the world. The USDA-ARS Southwest Watershed Research Center has recently developed an electronic data processing system that includes an online interface (https://tucson.ars.ag.gov/dap) to provide public access to the data. The goal of the system is to promote analyses and interpretations of historic and current data by improving data access. The publicly accessible part of the system consists of an interactive Web site, which provides an interface to the data, and a relational database, which is used to process, store, and manage data. In addition, DAP was expanded to put sediment, meteorological, soil moisture and temperature, vegetation, CO2 and water flux, geographic information system (GIS) and aircraft and satellite spectral imagery data on line and to publish metadata for all WGEW long-term measurements.
