The Synthesis Summer Institute Capstone Events conclude an intensive, interdisciplinary summer research experience for graduate students. With a symposium format, these events provide great opportunities for participants to engage with a diverse team of scientists and advance hydrologic synthesis.

Nominations to receive travel stipends for symposium participation are being accepted. Preference will be given to early career individuals (post-docs and faculty). Selected individuals should be prepared to participate in discussions around the seminar topics as well as present their own related work. To apply for one of these events, please submit a paragraph to the listed contact. The paragraph should highlight what expertise and interest the nominee will contribute to the event as well as how participation will enhance the individual's career.

Visit the CUAHSI Capstone Events Web page for more information.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Extrapolating from that analogy, a video must be worth immeasurably more. CUAHSI has expanded its video repertoire beyond the WebEx versions of the Cyberseminars series to include links on the CUAHSI Cyberseminars Archive page to non-WebEx proprietary video versions we have recently posted on SciVee. You can access individual cyberseminars in either format from the Archive page (www.cuahsi.org/sem-archive.html) or view the entire Videos in Hydrologic Science collection on SciVee (www.scivee.tv/node/4107/video).

In addition, we have culled video links from past editions of the eNews Brief and compiled a page of links that we hope to expand upon in the coming months. This compendium of links can be found on the Community Interest Videos page at www.cuahsi.org/community-videos.html. If you have links to videos that you feel are relevant to the hydrologic science community, please forward them to commgr@cuahsi.org. Thank you.

The second workshop on a Community Hydrologic Modeling Platform (CHyMP) was held March 31-April 1 at the University of Memphis Fedex Institute of Technology in Memphis, TN. The workshop was attended by xx scientists from yy different institutions. Many federal agencies, including NASA, NOAA, USGS, EPA, USDA, Army Corps of Engineers, were represented at the workshop.

Workshop highlights included presentations on a wide array of modeling platforms developed by Federal agencies and by academic consortia, the latest developments in the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information Systems project, and a panel discussion by participants from Federal agencies and the private sector. Five working groups were held on the Scientific Justification, on the Scientific Capabilities, on Software Approach and Architecture, on Community Engagement and a Collaborative Development, and on Developing a National Water Model. The workshop report is being prepared.

PDF versions of PowerPoint presentations shown during the workshop are available at the CHyMP workshop Web site.

For additional background information on the CHyMP, please refer to the Community Modeling in Hydrologic Science article in Eos, Vol. 89, No. 32, 5 August 2008.

We would like to take this opportunity to welcome four new organizations into the CUAHSI membership ranks. They collectively represent a broad spectrum of experience and involvement in hydrologic science. Their membership expands CUAHSI's U.S. and international base and we will all benefit from their involvement in our community. Please join me in welcoming them and we look forward to working together with their representatives in upcoming workshops and symposia.

• Carnegie Mellon University — Representative: Jeanne VanBriesen
• Portland State University — Representative: Hamid Moradkhani
• Queensland University of Technology — Representative: Malcolm Cox (Alternate: Peter Grace)
• University of Quebec - Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) — Representative: Claudio Paniconi (Alternate: Alain Rousseau)

UNESCO's Hydrology for the Environment, Life and Policy (UNESCO-HELP) program has accepted the Iowa Cedar Rivers Basin as a new UNESCO-HELP basin. UNESCO-HELP network is the only UNESCO program for watersheds. It promotes land and water resources sustainability using advanced concepts in watershed science and management. More about the program can be found at: www.unesco.org/water/ihp/help.

In essence, the proposal is a capacity building effort that will initiate a collaborative partnership between scientists, decision makers, and stakeholders centered on the Iowa-Cedar Rivers Basin. The special feature of our basin in the UNESCO-HELP network is the integration of complementary resources in a common cyberinfratructure-based observatory. State, federal and other data sources will be integrated using extensively CUASHI's HIS and SYNTHESIS projects components for multiple purposes (science, decision-making, education, and outreach).

The proposed Iowa-Cedar River Basin is the first UNESCO-HELP basin in Midwest, U.S.A., a region with ample significations for the nation's waters. In the last decades, rivers and streams in this basin have produced record floods while becoming primary contributors of nitrogen and phosphorus in the Upper Mississippi River Basin that eventually contribute to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. The focus of the present UNESCOHELP basin is to address the main "paradigm lock" still impeding the Integrated Water Resources Management implementation: the gap between the decision makers interested in sustainable land and water scenario analysis and the scientists interested in improving the understanding of watershed processes and their investigative tools. For this purpose, the project will build a basin-scale Eco-Hydrologic Observatory that networks and scales up: 1) science from small to large scale, 2) sensor-to-cyberinfrastructure technology, 3) collaboration among multi-institution researchers, and 4) coordination between university, state and federal agencies.

Please contact Marian Muste, University of Iowa (marian-muste@uiowa.edu) if you would like more information on this initiative.

On March 24-25, 2009 on the campus of Kansas State University, Dr. Tim Whiteaker of the HIS team presented a workshop to key personnel in state agencies and universities of Kansas, including faculty, research staff, students, technical experts, and geo/hydro data specialists. This 1.5-day workshop introduced participants to the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS). In the morning of the first day, participants learned what HIS is, why it is useful, how to use it, and who is using it. During the remainder of the workshop, participants played the role of a data publisher with hands-on training on how to load raw data into HIS, publish the data online in a standard way with web services, and register their service with HIS Central so that others can discover their data. Participants walked away with an understanding of how HIS works and what it takes to publish data with HIS, along with ideas for how to move forward in implementing HIS for Kansas. The material used for this conference is available at their GIS portal http://gis.ksu.edu/index.php?page=Research/Partners.

Upcoming workshops include:

• May 27, 2009 - Texas HIS Workshop, to be held on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin
• June 4-5, 2009 - HIS Workshop, to be held on the University of Vermont campus in Burlington, Vermont