CUAHSI is still accepting applications from current graduate students who wish to travel to other field sites or work with other research groups as part of their graduate research program. Up to five travel grants, each with a maximum amount of $5000.00, will be awarded. The deadline for receipt of applications is December 31, 2009.

In announcing these fellowships, CUAHSI Executive Director Rick Hooper noted that graduate training in hydrologic science typically focuses on a single field site or single modeling approach. To assist graduate students in enriching their research program by moving beyond a "one site, one view" approach to research, CUAHSI is providing travel support for graduate students to make an extended visit (approximately 1-3 months) to conduct field research at an additional site or to collaborate with a research group using alternate modeling methods of those in a graduate student's current research program.

CUAHSI Pathfinder Fellowships, as these awards are called, will be awarded each year for the next 5 years. For additional information, visit www.cuahsi.org/pathfinder/.

December 12, 2009—The workshop is meant to provide a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of distributed temperature sensing using fiber optics to help people decide if it would be suitable for their needs. We will have lots of instruments, fiber, and the tools required to put the systems together in Berkeley, and you will have 4 hours to try your hand at every aspect of the process. [Learn about the DTS workshop || Fiber optics background paper].

Evening events on Tuesday of Fall AGU Meeting

• CUAHSI Reception at Fall AGU: Tuesday, December 15^th at the Grand Hyatt (from the lobby take 2 sets of escalators down to the Ballroom Level, the Ballroom East is straight ahead on the left)—meeting begins at 6:30pm; reception following until 9:00pm. Hors d'oeuvres & libations will be served.
• On Tuesday afternoon, December 15, in Moscone Center 102 a special Hydrology session on "Progress in Hydrologic Science since the Blue Book" is scheduled. Pete Eagleson will make a few opening remarks and we have a great line up of speakers. This session is in honor of Doug James who is retiring from NSF.

CUAHSI's annual membership meeting and elections for Board of Directors will take place via teleconference and WebEx conference on December 8, 2009 at 3:00pm Eastern time.

Nominees for Board of Directors

• Robyn Hannigan — University of Massachusetts-Boston
• Carol A. Johnston — South Dakota State University
• Witold Krajewski — University of Iowa
• Xu Liang — University of Pittsburgh
• Larry Murdoch — Clemson University
• Aaron Packman — Northwestern University
• Enrique Vivoni — Arizona State University

See the Nominees for the CUAHSI Board of Directors - 2009 page on the CUAHSI Web site for additional information.

Agenda items for discussion

• State of the Consortium: Plans for Next 5 Years
  • Repopulation of Standing Committees
  • Role of Member Representatives in Strategic Planning Process
• Approval of meeting minutes, December 2008
• Election of new members to the Board of Directors

HydroDesktop (formerly referred to as HIS Desktop) is a new component of the HIS project intended to address the problem of how to obtain, organize and manage hydrologic data on a user's computer to support analysis and modeling. As designed and developed thus far, HydroDesktop is focused on facilitating the discovery and access of hydrologic data and, secondarily, providing support for data manipulation and synthesis. It also provides a visualization tool for HIS Server based data and a platform for the integration of HIS data.

HydroDesktop is being developed using the open source MapWindow 6 open source GIS (geographic information system) software development toolkit together with a number of existing open source spatial and temporal data analysis and visualization tools. In this way, the full software package meets the requirement of being completely open source and accessible for third party developers and researchers. Additionally, HydroDesktop's design maintains the use of a plug-in architecture that allows for the extension of the program's core functionality and encourages third party participation in the open development community.

For additional information, see the Overview document.