Abstract
In the last decades, the urbanization process and population growth
resulted in a substantial increase of water consumption for
agricultural, industrial, and residential purposes. The characterization
of the interplay between environmental variables and water resources
plays a critical role for establishing effective water management
policies. In this paper, we apply the Canonical Correlation Analysis
(CCA) in a set of climate and hydrological indicators to investigate the
behavior of these environmental variables over time in different
geographical regions of California, as well as the relationship among
these regions. CCA served as base to establish a temporal graph that
models the relation between the stations over time, and advanced graph
visualization techniques are used to produce patterns that aids in the
comprehension of the underlying phenomena. Our results identified
important temporal patterns, such as heterogeneous behavior in the dry
season and lower correlation between the stations in La Niña years. We
show that the combination of CCA and visual analytics can assist water
experts in the identification of important climate and hydrological
events in different scenarios.