John Wilson

1. Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI)Predicting, Detecting, and ManagingWATER IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENTA Science Plan for Community-Based Infrastructure and Programs Presentation to CUAHSI Board of Directors January 10, 2006 John Wilson

2. Community-Based Infrastructure and Programsin Previous Hydrologic Science Planning Efforts Opportunities in Hydrologic Science (NRC, 1991) • Recommends field studies (campaigns, long-term field experiments) involving multiple disciplines coordinating observations around a common, multidisciplinary objective. Water Energy and Biota (WEB, 2000) • Recommends a ‘network of "natural laboratories" in key geographic areas eventually linked by a "National Hydrologic Facility." Such a system would design and facilitate deployment of cutting-edge instrumentation, support field observations, and support the organization, analysis and management of community data sets and models.’

3. thresholds interfaces HYDROVIEW Community-Based Infrastructure and Programsin Previous Hydrologic Science Planning Efforts prediction evolution CUAHSI Technical Report #1 (CUAHSI, 2002) • If we want to adapt to changes and uncertainty in our freshwater resources, we need to improve our understanding of and ability to characterize and predict the storage, movement and transformations of water in natural and impacted environments. heterogeneity coupling adaptation patterns scaling

4. Community-Based Infrastructure and Programsin Previous Hydrologic Science Planning Efforts • CUASHSI, 2005 • Coupling • How do environmental perturbations propagate across interfaces and through the earth surface system, and how does the system respond to multiple perturbations. • Scaling • How do the dominant processes controlling hydrologic and biogeochemical cycles change across scales? • Adaptation and Evolution • How do natural and human systems interact, adapt and evolve to determine the response of a basin to external forcings?

5. June 2005 BoD Meeting • Identified a major stumbling block to be the lack of a comprehensive Science Plan that sets out the community vision • Independent of funding opportunities. • Independent of current CUAHSI plans & activities. • Leads from the science & focuses on community level needs. • Addresses implementation. • Appointed the CUAHSI Science Advisory Team

6. Why Revisit CUAHSI Plan Now? • We need a mature, defensible, and sound science plan that • makes it clear why community based efforts are necessary to advance hydrologic science, • provides a description and justification for those efforts, and • provides guidance to prioritize activities and support decisions

7. CUAHSI Science Advisory Team • Lead: John Wilson Project Manager: Kevin Dressler • Members: • Ana Barros, Rafael Bras, David Gochis, George Hornberger, Venkat Lakshmi, Upmanu Lall, David Maidment, Murugesu Sivapalan, Bridget Scanlon • Consultants: • Roger Bales, Steve Burges, Chris Duffy, John Selker, Soroosh Sorooshian • Charge: To develop a “next generation” science plan • Deliverable: • “Science Plan” for review Winter (February) 2006

8. Predicting, Detecting, and ManagingWATER IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT PrefaceExecutive SummaryChapter 1. Vision: Water in a Changing EnvironmentChapter 2. Approach and its Elements Chapter 3. Environmental Change and WaterChapter 4. The Water Cycle and the BiosphereChapter 5. Human Interactions with the Natural EnvironmentChapter 6. Opportunities for Education, Outreach and ApplicationsChapter 7. Links and PartnershipsChapter 8. Implementation Concluding RemarksAppendices

9. Chapter 1. Water in a Changing Environment • Preamble (an example) • Hydrologic Science • Changing Natural and Human Environment • Science Challenges • Limitations of Current Science and of current Science Programs • Goal and Benefits • Why Now?

10. Hydrologic Science • Concerns the “… occurrence, distribution, circulation and properties of water on the earth … affected by physical, chemical, biological processes within all … components of the Earth system.” (NRC, 1991) • That Earth system, and the role of water within it, is dynamic and changing.

11. Chapter 1. Water in a Changing Environment • Preamble (with an example) • Hydrologic Science • Changing Natural and Human Environment • Science Challenges • Limitations of Current Science and of current Science Programs • Goal and Benefits • Why Now?

12. Changing Natural and Human Environment(Scientific Context) • The Earth system, and the role of water within it, is dynamic and changing. • “Dynamic” because the quantity and quality of water respond to and influence natural and human-induced environmental changes. • Geomorphology, geology, vegetation, climate, built environment, agriculture, … • There is dynamism in the surrounding environment (human and natural systems) and dynamism in hydrologic processes and conditions.   • “Changing” because climate, population, land use, etc., are changing.

13. Chapter 1. Water in a Changing Environment • Preamble (with an example) • Hydrologic Science • Changing Natural and Human Environment • Science Challenges • Limitations of Current Science and of current Science Programs • Goal and Benefits • Why Now?

14. Science Challenges within the context of water in a changing environment • How do linkages and feedbacks within the water cycle respond to environmental change? • How does the biosphere interact with the water cycle? • How do human interactions with the natural environment affect the availability of water?

15. Chapters 3-5, the three challenges: • Each chapter begins with introductory paragraphs that emphasize context, including • The importance of this general area and its science challenges • The limitations of current science in this general area and of current science programs to address these challenges • The role and benefits of a community-based approach • Then presents several Example Key Research Questions, • Each with a similar outline, where for each question we emphasize only one or perhaps two of the different aspects of the approach.

16. Chapter 1. Water in a Changing Environment • Preamble (an example) • Hydrologic Science • Changing Natural and Human Environment • Science Challenges • Limitations of Current Science and of Current Science Programs • Goal and Benefits • Why Now?

17. Limitations of Current ScienceAn example from watershed science • Hydrology has fixated on hydrographs • i.e. on the smoothing power of landscapes • What happens when rain falls on the ground? • the classical surface hydrology problem • We have always operated on the assumption that there are at least three mechanisms, and they happen all the time • infiltration excess, saturation excess, shallow subsurface flow, groundwater flow etc,

18. Limitations of Current ScienceAn example from watershed science • In fact, they do not happen all the time, • if there are 100 events in a year, data shows that there are different levels of filtering. • Only a few events trigger infiltration excess runoff, more trigger saturation excess runoff, and yet more subsurface flow, • yet we have not bothered and succeeded to separate these events in the "frequency domain".

19. Limitations of Current ScienceAn example from watershed science • Given that this happens, • and may impact on floods etc, and • may differentially change with environmental change and human impacts, • What sort of measurements can we envisage so that we can track, understand, separate and model these mechanisms? • (one answer lies in being strategic and opportunistic in the way we use instruments and measurement techniques.)

20. Chapter 1. Water in a Changing Environment • Preamble (an example) • Hydrologic Science • Changing Natural and Human Environment • Science Challenges • Limitations of Current Science and of current Science Programs • Goal and Benefits • Why Now?

21. Chapter 2. Approach and its Elements • Introduction • Observing Strategy • Seasonal to Century to Millennia Reconstructions      • Reference Sites • Campaigns • Engineering Elements • Cyberinfrastructure and Communications Framework • Instrumentation and Sensor Packages • Synthesis • Relationship to Hydroview (make an appendix?)

22. Approach acknowledges that CUAHSI plays different roles: • Advances science by • Facilitating research by individual PIs and collaborations • between PIs, and • among PIs and agencies • and even among agencies. • Coordinating and synthesizing data, theory and modeling • Especially new observations in hydrologic science. • Identifying and addressing important gaps in knowledge • Serves society by • Bringing scientific advances to the attention of the applied community, decision makers, and the public. • Coordinating education and outreach in the hydrologic sciences.

23. Approach acknowledges thathydrologic science can be separated: • Hydrologic Process Science • Theory and Models • Hydrologic Information (Place-Based) Science • Observations and Data

24. Hydrologic Process Science • The description of water flow and chemical & sediment transport, and biogeochemical transformation processes, through theory and models, including process integration, for hydrologic understanding and prediction; • Processes themselves don’t change, but process science changes by advancing scientific understanding, theory and models.

25. Hydrologic Information (Place-Based) Science • The description of hydrologic environments by observations, using data models for information integration and hydrologic visualization. • Place-based science does change, because what is happening to or at the place is changing. • While processes themselves don’t change, which processes are important at that place may be changing, smoothly in time, or dramatically as when a threshold is exceeded.

26. Chapter 2. Approach and its Elements • Introduction • Observing Strategy • Seasonal to Century to Millennia Reconstructions      • Reference Sites • Campaigns • Engineering Elements • Cyberinfrastructure and Communications Framework • Instrumentation and Sensor Packages • Synthesis • Relationship to Hydroview (make an appendix?)

27. Observing Strategy: Season to Century to Millennia Reconstructions • Reconstructions • To observe (detect) and understand change in the past • Vegetation, Climate, Biogeochemistry, Humans, & feedbacks between them • To populate and test integrated models with data sets • To target processes, variables and locations for future observations • To target processes for theory and model development • Employs Cyberinfrastructure

28. Observing Strategy: Reference Sites • Long term observations capable of detecting and observing change at a fixed place. • Existing (including agency) and new locations. • Multi-scale, multidisciplinary observations • Point, hillslope, reach, basin, … • Physical, chemical, biological, social and economic • Adaptive design • Using non-static observation locations

29. Observing Strategy:Campaigns • Short and Long Term Campaigns • Go to where the action is: focused observations in a dynamic and changing environment. • Short (weeks); Long (several years) • With or without association to a reference site. • Opportunistic Campaigns in response to rare events • Especially when and where they dominate fluxes • Water, nutrients, sediments, energy, biota

30. Chapter 2. Approach and its Elements • Introduction • Observing Strategy • Seasonal to Century to Millennia Reconstructions      • Reference Sites • Campaigns • Engineering Elements • Cyberinfrastructure and Communications Framework • Instrumentation and Sensor Packages • Synthesis • Relationship to Hydroview (make an appendix?)

31. Cyberinfrastructure A digital framework for models and data that integrates hydrologic science knowledge in a consistent fashion • Ultimate deliverable, some decades in the future, is an operational modeling framework, capable of ingesting information and making predictions of all processes at all time and space scales. • Mobilizes scientific knowledge in an operational framework that allows anyone to view and understand hydrologic phenomena and environments,and decision makers & the public to have confidence in the use of scientific understanding for decision making.

32. Something like what a telescope does for an astronomer. “Instead of standing on the earth and viewing the heavens through a physical telescope, we are, so to speak, in the heavens looking back at a virtual earth into any part of which we can zoom, probe, observe, and investigate hydrologic science.”

33. Instrumentation & Sensor Packages • Reference-site base packages • Standard deployable packages • e.g. compact hydrologic stations, fiber optic high spatially-resolved temperature, 2D ERT array, ETR+S arrays, etc • Modeling, methods and training for the strategic and opportunistic use of sensors, instruments and measurements • Facility • Develop new technology for high resolution observations, especially for states and fluxes along interfaces. • Support reference sites, campaigns, and individual investigators

34. Chapter 2. Approach and its Elements • Introduction • Observing Strategy • Seasonal to Century to Millennia Reconstructions      • Reference Sites • Campaigns • Engineering Elements • Cyberinfrastructure and Communications Framework • Instrumentation and Sensor Packages • Synthesis Activities • Relationship to Hydroview (make an appendix?)

35. Synthesis Activities • Provide vehicle to • organize planned & opportunistic observational campaigns • coordinate the activities, and assess and blend the products, from the other elements of CUAHSI • foster formulation of new hydrologic science questions and research initiatives through a synthesis (or cross-cutting analysis) of existing information and theories • Provide direction for future science programs and infrastructure needs

36. Synthesis Activities • How? Two aspects: • Physical facility (work in progress) • Centralized at CUAHSI or at a single institution, or • Various tasks distributed among different institutions • Virtual facility integrated with the Cyberinfrastructure • i.e., cybercollaboratory

37. Chapter 2. Approach and its Elements • Introduction • Observing Strategy • Seasonal to Century to Millennia Reconstructions      • Reference Sites • Campaigns • Engineering Elements • Cyberinfrastructure and Communications Framework • Instrumentation and Sensor Packages • Synthesis • Relationship to Hydroview (make an appendix?)

38. Relationship to HYDROVIEW

39. Relationship to HYDROVIEW • HIS and HMF have similar roles to play in this next generation science plan • HIS  Cyberinfrastructure • HMF  Instrumentation and Sensor Packages • Who does communication? • While there is a need for “synthesis” activities, we are still exploring what form that should take. • While the observing strategy includes fixed-place observing facilities, there are only part of a more flexible and scalable approach.

40. Chapter 6. Opportunities for Education, Outreach and Applications • Audiences • Higher Education, K-12, Public, Applications Community • Primary Means • Through Cyberinfrastructure, Instrumentation, Reference Sites and Synthesis Activities • Also targeted activities and informal education • Need to partner

41. From projects formulated to achieve specific goals From disciplines working independently From organizations gathering & organizing data to fit their own needs From models formed to simulate individual processes From field stations positioned in relatively homogeneous areas. To projects formulated to contribute to a portfolio To disciplines merging to address higher-ordered problems. To setting standards and protocols so data can be freely exchanged and readily used by all. To a community modeling framework that simulates interactions among diverse processes To observations across a network where multiple disciplines work from a common data base among a network of heterogeneous sites Chapter 7. Links and Partnerships Within NSF, with other federal and state agencies, and with NGOs, transforming hydrologic science:

42. Chapter 8. Implementation • Aspects • Step-wise • Learn from each step • Adaptable and Flexible • As science changes • not heavily indebted to existing paradigms • As the community changes • As funding opportunities change • Scalable • Actionable Items • Priorities and Decisions

43. Priorities and Decisions • Criteria for setting priorities and making decisions about • Selecting and balancing • Reconstruction targets • Reference site locations and designs • Campaigns choices and elements • Cyberinfrastructure, Data and Modeling (Framework) emphasis and protocols • Instrumentation & sensor packages • Shelf-life • Mobility • Versatility • Transparently Useful • And other design and operational issues

44. Predicting, Detecting, and ManagingWATER IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT PrefaceExecutive SummaryChapter 1. Vision: Water in a Changing EnvironmentChapter 2. Approach and its Elements Chapter 3. Environmental Change and WaterChapter 4. The Water Cycle and the BiosphereChapter 5. Human Interactions with the Natural EnvironmentChapter 6. Opportunities for Education, Outreach and ApplicationsChapter 7. Links and PartnershipsChapter 8. Implementation Concluding RemarksAppendices

45. What next? • Past • Meetings • The SAT has been meeting weekly (phone conference) since late August. • Face-to-face meeting in mid-November • Presentations • at AGU in December • this presentation is the first to the BoD • Writing • First cut draft of entire report • The key has been to focus on substance, especially concept, logic and importance, and to not worry about wordsmithing. • If there is an exception to this, its words that help convey the excitement and importance of what we are trying to do. • Future • Draft report • Complete and polish draft • The committee will review and revised draft in January • Improving the concepts and their organization, etc • There will then be an opportunity for BoD and other interested parties to comment on the plan before it is finalized. • The report will then be revised again and submitted to CUAHSI for an independent review

46. A few extra iterations … • Our deadlines are artificial, though real. • If we take a couple of extra iterations to get it right, we should do so. • “We need a mature, defensible, and sound science plan that • makes it clear why community based efforts are necessary to advance hydrologic science, • provides a description and justification for those efforts, and • provides guidance to prioritize activities and support decisions.”