CUAHSI has been awarded a grant by the Johnson Family Foundation to develop pilot online educational materials that build upon CUAHSI's successful Let's Talk About Water program. CUAHSI has collaborated with Linda Lilienfeld on the development of Let's Talk about Water (LTAW), a film symposium designed to bring together experts and the public to talk about the complex water issues facing society. The events use water-themed films use as a point of engagement to encourage students to see the importance of objective scientific information in thinking about environmental problems, and to raise interest and awareness in careers in water science. CUAHSI has been a part of successful LTAW events at member universities such as University of North Carolina, University of California at Irvine, and University of Massachusetts-Boston. This grant will allow CUAHSI staff and an advisory board drawn from CUAHSI membership, education professionals, and public policy experts to develop online resources for educators interested in harnessing the formula of Let's Talk About Water to hold their own events and to use film more effectively in the classroom. The resource will contain summaries and lessons learned from LTAW events, a library of films tagged by water science concepts. It will also include common audience questions, example learning objectives and exercises, and a guide to creating successful campus LTAW-like events.

CUAHSI will develop pilot materials around specific films, and will test these materials with students at upcoming LTAW events also funded through this grant. CUAHSI is interested in hearing from our membership on their experiences using film in the classroom, and those interested in sharing their experiences through the website. Those interested in learning more about Let's Talk About Water or the pilot online project are encouraged to contact Jennifer Arrigo (jarrigo@cuahsi.org) to get involved.

The CUAHSI conference on Hydrologic Data and Information Systems was held on June 22 - 24th on the Utah State University campus in Logan, UT. Over 95 participants drawn from academia, federal and state agencies, and the private sector attended. Thirty six talks and 14 posters were presented. Many of these presentations are available online. They showcase the scientific progress enabled through the use of advanced information and data management systems such as the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS), a web-based system for sharing hydrologic data. There were presentation from several national and international projects developing or advancing data and information systems, including DataONE, the Critical Zone Observatories, UNIDATA, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Hemholtz institute in Germany, and the CIMA Foundation in Italy. There was also a presentation by Eva Zanzerkia from the National Science Foundation describing new NSF initiatives in the area of cyberinfrastructure and earth observations, such as the recently announced Earth Cube initiative.

The conference provided an excellent opportunity for networking among science and data professionals, as well as a chance for the community to interact with the CUAHSI - HIS project team. In addition to poster and presentation sessions, several workshops and one-on-one help sessions were held on CUAHSI-HIS components. A plenary round table discussion held on the last day focused on engaging the user community in future development of the HIS system. Some highlights include:

• Based on the success of the conference workshop, CUAHSI and the HIS team are planning a series of Fall webinars on various topics related to HIS. Contact Yoori Choi, User Support Specialist (ychoi@cuahsi.org) for more information or to suggest topics.
• A new version of CUAHSI's HydroDesktop software for data discovery and integration of data from multiple sources was introduced to workshop participants. It includes several new user-requested features. The latest version can be downloaded at: hydrodesktop.codeplex.com
  • "Download Manager" — The progress and status of data downloads are now displayed to the user.
  • "Metadata Fetcher" — This new plug-in allows users to access data from local WaterOneFlow services which are not registered with HIS Central.
• CUAHSI maintains a Google Group for users of the HIS system. Contact Yoori Choi to join (ychoi@cuahsi.org).

David Tarboton of Utah State hosted the conference, and Kim Schreuders at USU served as conference organizer. The conference was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. For more information on the conference, including the full program and presentations, visit his.cuahsi.org/conference2011/.

NASA Hydrologic Data and Information Services Center (HDISC) has integrated North-American Land Data Assimilation Systems (NLDAS) into CUAHSI HIS. This is a collaboration with the Hydrologic Sciences Branch GSFC NASA and CUAHSI HIS. It has developed a web service that serves NASA hydrological data as time series. The NLDAS hydrologic data became searchable, retrievable, and analyzable via HydroDesktop (hydrodesktop.codeplex.com). The goal of NLDAS is to construct quality-controlled, and spatially and temporally consistent, land-surface model (LSM) datasets from the best available observations and model output to support modeling activities. NLDAS is currently running in near real-time on a 1/8th-degree grid over central North America. Retrospective NLDAS datasets and simulations also extend back to January 1979. You can find more information about the NLDAS data set at ldas.gsfc.nasa.gov/nldas/.