CUAHSI — Catchment Comparison Exercise 2010
Understanding the Dynamics of Hydrologic and Biogeochemical Stores
CUAHSI is kicking off a community exercise to perform a comparison among field sites around the globe on the stores of water and chemicals and the dynamics of these stores. This exercise is structured as an initial set of exploratory calculations at individual sites to be presented as webinars during the Fall of 2009. This will be followed by applying different calculations approaches across sites during the spring. Finally, results will be presented during the CUAHSI Biennial Colloquium to be held in July, 2010.
The webinars are free and open to everyone. The first three webinars for the fall have been scheduled. All are also welcome to participate by contributing data, methods or both to this exercise. If you wish to lead a webinar, slots remain open for the fall and the spring has not yet been scheduled.
• Background
How much water do we have? How accessible is it? How will it change in response to climate variation, human development patterns, and economic activities? Is the current water resources infrastructure adequate to maintain an adequate supply of water? If not, how must it be changed? Answering these questions is a central challenge for hydrologic science.
Although hydrologic fluxes, such as streamflow and precipitation, are commonly measured and predicted, measuring and predicting the amount of water present in a watershed is seldom done; tracking the dynamics of these stores is done even more rarely. Biogeochemists more typically estimate the stores and fluxes of chemicals in watersheds, but seldom consider year-to-year changes in these stores.
The storage of water has not been typically estimated because it is difficult to do so, even in data-rich experimental watersheds. However, with new geophysical methods, like microgravity, we have additional ways to approach this problem. Furthermore, the GRACE satellite provides rough estimates (at coarse spatial and temporal resolution) across the entire globe. Further developing these estimates will require combining traditional estimation using measurements such as groundwater levels and soil moisture with new geophysical measurements.
The premise of this workshop is that many existing field sites have sufficient data to estimate annual and/or seasonal stores of water and associated solutes for many years, even many decades. The spatial and temporal patterns of these stores will provide new insights into hydrologic processes and to enable hypotheses to be generated and new field measurement campaigns to be designed. Comparing the methods for deriving storage estimates from field measurements will also provide the opportunity to compare conceptual models of watershed structure across the participating sites.
• Steering Committee
Jim McNamara (Boise State University), Chair
Beth Boyer (Penn State University)
Doerthe Tetzlaff (University of Aberdeen)
Peter Troch (University of Arizona)
Brian McGlynn (Montana State University)
Ross Woods (NIWA-invited)
Kevin Bishop (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)
Jake Peters (USGS)
Danny Marks (ARS-invited)
Charlie Luce (USFS-invited)