Notice of Intent to Award - R20AC00008 (2).pdf

Notice of Intent to Award Template (03/2019)

NOTICE OF INTENT TO AWARD

This notice is not a request for applications. This provides public notice of the Bureau of Reclamation’s intention to fund the following project activities without full and open competition.

OPPORTUNITY

NUMBER

BOR-DO-20-N008

PROJECT TITLE Operational Reservoir Evaporation Estimates for Reclamation Reservoirs RECIPIENT Nevada System of Higher Education (Desert Research Institute)

ANTICIPATED

FEDERAL AMOUNT

$499,797.00

STATUTORY

AUTHORITY

Public Law 111-11, Section 9509, Research Agreement Authority “The Secretary may enter into contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements, for periods not to exceed 5 years, to carry out research within the Bureau of Reclamation.”

CFDA NUMBER 15.560

RECLAMATION

POINT OF

CONTACT

Matthew Reichert Grants Management Specialist 303-445-3865 mreichert@usbr.gov

SUMMARY OF

PROJECT

ACTIVITIES

Under this Agreement, the Recipient shall study the Operational Reservoir Evaporation Estimates for Reclamation Reservoirs. Desert Research Institute (DRI) is developing operational evaporation estimates at a daily time step for Reclamation reservoirs using newly developed algorithms in combination with gridded weather and remote sensing data. This work will leverage ongoing Reclamation-DRI partnerships related to reservoir evaporation monitoring. The methods will be validated at locations where in-situ reservoir evaporation monitoring data are available (many of these sites were developed/deployed in partnership with DRI).

This data will be made available in near real-time via the new Reclamation open data portal, RISE (Reclamation Information Sharing Environment).

The research areas of focus: Develop Evaporation Algorithm and Geodatabase

Researchers at Cal Poly Pomona Foundation will focus on the following tasks:

• Implement Operational Evaporation Algorithm and Storage of Inputs and

Results in Geodatabase and Geoserver

• Develop Web Map Interface, Geoserver Vector Tiles, and Time Series and

Spatial Summary Data Visualization and Download

SELECTION

JUSTIFICATION

Reclamation did not solicit full and open competition for this award based on the following criteria:

Unique Qualifications: The Recipient has expertise in creating and modeling the type of algorithms used in evaporation estimates. Reclamation has previously partnered with DRI to create open source software for the modeling and tracking of evaporation.

The Principal Investigator and Desert Research Institute has the expertise and past performance in evaporation and evapotranspiration studies with climate and satellite web application projects while working with Reclamation with an excellent record.

They have collaborated with regional facilities with great success in experimental work on this type of project.