Coordinator:
Martin O'CONNOR

The Personal Barometer (PB) is a stand-alone application designed to calculate per capita and whole household domestic water consumption and provide feedback on the impact of consumption levels based on water use data entered by the user. The application provides feedback on water consumption using the concept of a water shadow - the area (in m2/year per person, household, region and country) required to supply enough water to fulfil a given level of water consumption under the annual rainfall of the region or country being considered (e.g. where the user resides).

The user first of all selects a country then chooses a region within that country as their place of residence, or place to explore water consumption impact. The PB is geographically explicit to account for the potentially significant differences in precipitation experienced by different geographic locations. The user can choose regions in Spain, France, UK & Germany and also look at his / her water shadow in Gabon and Jordan.

The user is then guided through a series of rooms in a ‘virtual house’ with information on water use in each room (description, volumes etc.), instructions on how to enter consumption data in the fields available, and information on water conservation options provided in room-specific windows. Once data has been entered for all rooms the user is presented with a mixture of numeric, graphical and text-based analysis of their water consumption (per person and for their whole house) in the context of their selected region. Daily and annual consumption figures are calculated along with personal and household water shadows. Further the user is presented with a regional water shadow (water shadow for all people in selected region is they consume the same amount of water as the user) and, for Gabon and Jordan, the user is presented with a country-wide water shadow.