At the end of 2022, 65 percent of the Western United States was in severe drought, the result of a two decades long mega drought in the Colorado River Basin … However, it was flooding, not drought, that was making headlines when we began our research for this story about OpenET, a revolutionary new online platform geared towards helping farmers and water managers monitor and reduce water use in watersheds where supplies were not keeping up with demand. … According to NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System it will take more than one wet winter to replenish groundwater in many parts of the western United States. Groundwater levels across the California Central Valley and many parts of the Ogallala Aquifer continue to decline. The need for better water management remains essential, and yet the data necessary to support new approaches has not been broadly available.  Enter the OpenET project, a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort to make satellite-based evapotranspiration (ET) data available to the public.