CUASHI is moving its program office to the Boston area in August. Located at 196 Boston Avenue in Medford, MA 02155-4236, the CUAHSI office will be adjacent to the Tufts University campus. Relocation of the office to the Boston metro area will provide greater opportunity for the CUAHSI program staff to interact with the academic and research community. Staff at the Boston office includes Richard Hooper, President and Executive Director; David Kirschtel, Sr. Program Manager; and Yoori Choi, the newly hired User Support Specialist for Water Data Services. CUASHI will continue to maintain an administrative presence in Washington, DC to support interactions with NSF, federal agencies, and other environmental and science organizations.

As part of CUAHSI's renewal funding and conversion of NSF support from grants to Cooperative Agreement, NSF required that CUAHSI undergo a periodic Management Review. The purpose of this review is to evaluate CUAHSI's management, business operations and role in the hydrological sciences community. During this past spring CUAHSI underwent its initial Management Review. This proceeded from a series of written questions provided to and responses provided by the Executive Director and the Board of Directors through a reverse site visit with the review panel.

The panel had an "overall positive perspective" on CUAHSI's organizational development, noting that CUAHIS's "accomplishments over the past few years have been effective in community building and the organization is having a positive impact on hydrologic science."

The panel made a number of recommendations to assure that CUAHSI's continued development proceeded effectively and that the structure of the organization can support envisioned program expansion. The two most urgent recommendations of the review panel were that CUAHSI develop a long-term Strategic Plan (5-10 year horizon), and a comprehensive set of assessment metrics to evaluate performance. CUAHSI is already moving forward with planning of a workshop to provide for community input in the development and endorsement of the Strategic Plan.

Additionally, the panel recommended a number of changes to the use and structure of various committees involved in guiding decision making within CUAHSI; diversification of leadership with regard to both demographic and professional development status; "hardening" its business operations.

Beginning August 3^rd, Yoori Choi will join CUAHIS as the User Support Specialist for the Water Data Services. Yoori comes to CUAHSI from Drexel Universitys Department of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering. She holds a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from Drexel with a special emphasis on water resources and information systems. She received her masters degree in civil engineering under the direction of Michael Piasecki. Her Bachelor of Science degree was in Computer Science with dual minors in Business Administration and Mathematics. As you can see, Yoori brings a great deal of expertise to the CUAHSI staff. She will be located in the new Boston office.

Yoori will assist users in deploying CUAHSI Water Data Services (WDS), a service-oriented architecture for publishing time series data using web services. She will also have extensive interactions with data publishers and data analysts who seek to discover data using these services will be required, both in a one-on-one support mode and in formal training settings. Yoori will also gather information on bugs, feature requests, and other modifications required to WDS and communicate these requests to the Hydrologic Information System development team. In addition, she will lead the development of documentation manuals and the creation of a WDS user community forum. Prior to Yoori's arrival at CUAHSI user support and training has been provided by the HIS development team, primarily Tim Whiteaker.

CUAHSI plans to develop a Hydrologic Data Access Center within the next 5 years. Yooris staffing position is one of the first critical steps in developing such a center, which, when fully operational, will support the academic research community in publishing, discovering, and analyzing environmental data. Such a center would contain database specialists, software engineers, and user support personnel.

CUAHSI's Hydrograf(x)—a competition for short films in hydrology—has been expanded this year to include entries from both undergraduate and graduate students. This includes both pre-service and in-service K-12 educators doing Continuing Ed coursework to meet professional certification requirements. The deadline for entries is 15 November 2009.

The goal of this competition is to foster greater understanding and appreciation of hydrologic science. This competition also provides you and your students with an opportunity to present principles of hydrology in a non-traditional format as well as a means to interact with audiences that would not regularly be reached through more formal means.

For those of you teaching hydrology courses this summer or fall please consider including the development of these short films into your course curriculum. The use of multimedia is an excellent way to provide your students with an additional opportunity to present their knowledge and understanding of hydrology. We have specifically set the deadline to accommodate the academic calendar.

Visit the Hydrograf(x) home page for details.