This fall's cyberseminars feature results from the two Summer Synthesis Institutes (SSI) held last summer in New York City and Vancouver, British Columbia. These institutes were intensive, 6-week sessions that exposed graduate students to a broad range of topics, methods, and modes of scholarship. The New York SSI, under the direction of Charlie Vörösmarty of the City University of New York, continued the "Five-Hundred Year Challenge" of reconstructing human-water interactions in the Northeastern US from 1600 and projecting those interactions to 2100. This summer focused on the period 1800-1910. The Vancouver Institute, under the direction of Murugesu Sivapalan of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, explored the mechanisms behind observed patterns in water and solute dynamics. The SSIs held capstone events which were co-sponsored by CUAHSI and were open to the public, at their conclusion. Both groups plan to repeat the SSIs next summer.

The cyberseminars are scheduled for four Fridays during the fall:

October 9, 2009; 3:00pm ET

• UIUC Synthesis Project Team
  Presenters: Nandita Basu (U Iowa), Ciaran Harman (UIUC), Suresh Rao (Purdue), and Sally Thompson (Duke)
  Title: Sediment and contaminant dynamics across scales: Landscapes as cascading hydrologic and biogeochemical filters
  

October 23, 2009; 3:00pm ET

• CUNY Synthesis Project Team
  Title: Quantifying Historical Legacies: Challenges of Synthesis Research
  

November 13, 2009; 3:00pm ET

• UIUC Synthesis Project Team
  Presenters: Paul Brooks (Arizona), Ciaran Harman (UIUC), Sally Thompson (Duke), and Peter Troch (Arizona)
  Title: Water balance portioning at the catchment scale: Hydrosphere-biosphere Interactions
  

November 20, 2009; 3:00pm ET

• CUNY Synthesis Project Team
  Title: Hydrologic Evolution of the Northeast Region: Developing Hydrologic Metrics
  

Visit the CUAHSI Cyberseminar page for more information.

Jim McNamara, Boise State University, is leading a community effort to compare storage of water and solutes at catchments around the globe. Catchment Comparison Exercise 2010 (CCE2010) will focus on approaches for estimating stores of waters in snow/ice, vegetation, the vadose zone, groundwater, and surface water as well their seasonal and annual dynamics. CCE2010 is structured as a series of webinars over the fall and spring and will culminate in presentations at the CUAHSI Biennial Colloquium in July, 2010. CCE2010 is open to anyone who wishes to contribute data or methods. The first webinar will be held on September 23, 2009 at 11:00am ET. For additional information, visit www.cuahsi.org/cce2010.html.

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.

The Sierra to the Sea project was made possible by grants from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and the Kearney Foundation, and through support by the UC Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources (LAWR) and the John Muir Institute of the Environment (JMIE). Runtine: 33 minutes, 54 seconds.

View the video at sierratosea.ucdavis.edu/index.html.