The City of Norman, Oklahoma teamed with Garver, a multi-disciplined engineering, planning, and environmental services firm, to submit for an additional U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) funding grant that will develop a lake modeling tool for augmentation with reuse water.

On September 2, Norman received a letter from the BOR that the City would be awarded funding in 2022 under the WaterSMART Basin Study Program. The new BOR project will develop a cloud-based modeling tool that could assist staff in anticipating when to augment Lake Thunderbird based on several data inputs and algorithms. This will be valuable as Norman assesses the cost of treating reuse water for augmenting Lake Thunderbird.  Even if Lake augmentation with reuse does not occur in the future, this tool can anticipate the on/off cycles of any augmentation source that is used to mitigate the impacts of drought on Lake Thunderbird.  

This new Federal grant comes after Lake Thunderbird, the primary source of drinking water for the City of Norman, and the Cities of Del City and Midwest City, previously received a separate BOR grant to determine whether the lake could become a drought-resilient water supply through the use of Indirect Potable Reuse (IPR). The ongoing pilot study was one of four water reclamation and reuse research studies being conducted around the country to receive BOR funding.