State Water Project Facilitated Non-Project Water Transfers

A water transfer is a voluntary sale of water proposed and initiated by a willing seller who has legal rights to a supply of water to interested buyers within California. It usually takes place in relatively dry years, when only existing contractual water cannot meet the water demand. The Seller must take specific actions within the Seller’s service area to make this water available to the buyers as "new water" in the system. In other words, the transfer water would not appear in the watercourse absent the transfer.

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) helps facilitate water transfers that require conveyance through State Water Project facilities or requires DWR approval pursuant to the Water Code Section 1810. A detailed description of the technical information for preparing water transfer proposals can be found in the Draft Water Transfer White Paper. The preparation and review of water transfer proposals in accordance with guidance in the Draft Water Transfer White Paper takes place through an online web application, Water Transfer Information Management System (WTIMS). The dataset presented here is compiled from water transfer data available at WTIMS.

This dataset provides historical short-term water transfer information including the seller’s agency and their water rights (pre-1914 or post-1914), buyer’s agency, type of water transfer such as reservoir release, cropland idling, groundwater substitution, amount of transfer water made available from seller, and the amount of transfer water available at the point of transfer. Temporal coverage of this dataset is from 2008 to present. A web-based application is also provided to help with the historical water transfer data search.