Over 70 colleagues attended the November 14-16 Joint Workshop for WATERS Network Test Beds and CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) in Austin, Texas. Version 1.0 of the HIS was demonstrated to the participants who saw the potential benefits of this open and extensible system for accomplishing research more effectively and for transforming the way in which research can become more interdisciplinary and open. For environmental observatories to be effective, the observatories must attract the interest of scientists from the broad community, and a data system is critical for accomplishing that goal.
Eleven WATERS Network test bed projects have been awarded. Brief PowerPoint presentations were provided demonstrating that these are a diverse set of projects, each considering some aspect of observatory design and operation. The people involved with these test beds form a natural “beta testing” group for the HIS software to determine how effective and useful it is and to recommend changes before its final release. Ultimately, for a data system to be accepted, it must be useful to the individual scientist in accomplishing his or her goals.
In addition, the participant conducted two half-day breakout sessions during which they discussed the collaborative opportunities inherent in the test bed scenario and the information manager issues involved in getting started with the HIS.
Watershed Media Project
Water knits together our planet, linking the atmosphere, oceans, and continents through the hydrologic cycle. On land, where water is critical for life, following water’s path through this cycle provides an integrated view of the land, illustrating the ecosystem concept of the interconnectedness of the physical and biological worlds and linking humans to the natural world. This viewpoint of “following the water” provides an accessible means to communicate complex ideas about ecosystems, including the concept of material and energy cycles and human alterations to these cycles, to a broad audience. The Watershed Media Project encompasses a four-part video series, a companion DVD and book, website, and local outreach components to introduce the concept of the hydrologic cycle, to examine human influences to this cycle (including unintended consequences), and to explore sustainable development of resources. Through partners, such as CUAHSI, the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC), RiverNetwork, Inc., and the National Council on Science and the Environment (NCSE), the proposed video series will be brought home, literally, as its concepts are explained to local watershed stakeholders through meetings, the companion book, and web site. The collaboration between educational specialists dedicated to bringing these concepts to the general public and a large research community which is developing watershed-based environmental observatories offers an unprecedented educational opportunity. Unlike past documentaries on specific watersheds in crisis, this project seeks to explain the concepts of watershed processes and to demonstrate how they matter in the viewer’s life.
For additional information, see: www.watershedmediaproject.com.
High Performance Computing for Hydrological Sciences
Authored by: Venkat Lakshmi, et alia.
High performance computing (HPC) has been long used in the disciplines of atmospheric and ocean sciences due to their dependence on fine spatial grids and small time steps for integration. Historically, the land surface interaction with the atmosphere, biosphere and ocean had been represented by lumped, or spatially-aggregated, models. Lumped models do not have large computational requirements. However, with the growing recognition that the spatially distributed feedback from the land surface is important to weather events and the climate system, representation of the land surface is done with increasingly complex (and physically complete) models. As a result, the spatial grids and the temporal resolutions have become finer and thereby warrant computers with far greater computational and storage capacity than those used in the past.
In addition to coupled atmosphere-biosphere-ocean-land surface problems, there are a host of additional hydrological problems that require larger computer resources. These are – coupled groundwater-surface water-land surface mesoscale modeling; land- atmosphere-biosphere interaction modeling, calibration and uncertainty analysis of hydrologic systems; ensemble hydrological forecasting; land information systems and continental water dynamics.
In this document we attempt to briefly explain some of the science and the computational requirements associated with each of the above listed hydrological problems. Whereas we recognize that this list of problems is by no means exhaustive, it is a reasonable starting point for the utilization of high performance computing in hydrology.
The full HPC write-up can be downloaded from www.cuahsi.org/his/docs/hpc-writeup.pdf.
Introducing CarboKorea and HydroKorea Programs
Authored by: Nam C. Woo and Joon Kim
Carbokorea and HydroKorea programs were developed as an upgraded and expanded successor of KoFlux, based on a necessity of in-depth and inter-disciplinary approaches to carbon/water cycles for a typical - complex, mountainous - landscape of Korea. They are independent research projects to uniquely pursue carbon and water cycles on terrestrial ecosystems at diverse spatial/temporal scales. However, the outcomes will eventually put together and serve to characterize terrestrial carbon/water cycles based on a unified logical framework. For this, researchers focus on linking flux footprint, ecohydrologic schemes and satellite images to bridge the gaps between different scales of carbon/water exchange processes in a complex landscape. Scaling logic that incorporates a synergy of various inter-disciplinary researches will play a central role to achieve this goal and will be one of the practical deliverables.
Carbokorea and HydroKorea programs consist of inter-disciplinary and coordinated researches such as field measurements, numerical modeling and satellite image analysis. And the orchestrated researches are carried out in a representative landscape of the country, the Gwangneung supersite. The site is re-defined as a 7 x 7 km (MODIS) unit that includes the flux towers. Within this MODIS unit, a 3 x 3 km intensive monitoring unit is designated. The unit is further subdivided into nine 1 x 1 km basic units, comparable to the scale of MODIS grid, that become the basic component of intensive field monitoring, modeling and image analysis studies. The results obtained from the supersite will form a primary database for quantitative assessments of carbon/water cycles at various scales.
Research strategies could be summarized as follows:
- Field-based measurements including tower flux, soil H2O/CO2, hydrology, stable isotopes and ecological measurements to produce quality data that can be used for input parameters of various ecohydrological models and for validation of model results and satellite-derived data
- Eco-hydrological/biophysical modeling for scaling of field data into various temporal and spatial scales. Biome-BGC and RHESSys are the principal tools
- Remote Sensing and GIS including geo-statistical techniques to interpret high resolution satellite images (IKONOS and Landsat TM) and low resolution satellite images (MODIS) for regional-scale interpretation
- Data Information System and International Cooperation (AsiaFlux, FLUXNET, CEOP, GTOS, CUAHSI) to share and transfer valuable data and technologies to other scientists and public
Using the ‘Scaling logic’ methodologies developed in Carbo/HydroKorea programs, the carbon and water cycles will be monitored accurately from local to regional scales, thereby we can proactively provide options needed to minimize damage and to allow and encourage sustainable use of our biosphere.
Carbokorea is supported by “The Eco-Technopia 21 Project” from the Ministry of Environment, Korea and HydroKorea is supported by a grant (code: 1-8-2) from ‘Sustainable Water Resources Research Center’ of 21st Century Frontier Research Program. Further detailed information regarding Carbo/HydroKorea Programs can be found at www.hydrokorea.org/.
Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab - Update
DUSEL (Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab) is an NSF initiative to develop a facility for geoscience, biology, engineering, and physics investigations in the deep subsurface. The program is motivated by the need of the physics community to have a facility to house large experiments deep underground where they will be shielded from cosmic radiation; experiments to detect neutrinos are an example. Because constructing such a facility is expensive, the cost of building it will be leveraged by involving other scientific communities, including hydrology. Experiments involving flow, transport and deformation in fractured rock over a large range of spatial and temporal scales are examples of opportunities for hydrologists. Additional opportunities to study interactions between surface processes and the deep subsurface are also available.
The effort has been underway for more than 4 years and has resulted in several reports outlining the scientific vision for the facility (more info is available at. www.dusel.org/ and www.earthlab.org/). Two sites are now considered as viable candidates for the facility: the Henderson Mine in Colorado (nngroup.physics.sunysb.edu/husep/), and the Homestake Mine in South Dakota (www.lbl.gov/nsd/homestake/). Proposals that will be used to select one of these sites are currently being prepared for a due date in early January. After a single site is selected, there will be a three-year period for preparing a final design of the laboratory and receiving an approval from the National Science Board, who will make the decision about moving forward with a request to Congress for funding. Groundbreaking at DUSEL is expected in 2010 and the facility should be open for more than several decades.
It is important to recognize that even though the DUSEL effort has been underway for several years, it is not too late for you, or other colleagues at your institution, to become involved. Feel free to contact representatives from the Homestake or Henderson sites to express your interest. Also, feel free to contact me if you want more info. Larry Murdoch: lmurdoc@clemson.edu.
FerryMon Test Bed: Unattended Water Quality Monitoring
Estuaries are among the most productive and resourceful aquatic ecosystems on Earth. They are critical nurseries for coastal and offshore fisheries and provide a broad range of economic (urban, industrial, agricultural, tourism, fisheries) and societal (recreational, aesthetic) benefits and services. Estuaries receive and process the bulk of freshwater discharges, nutrients and pollutants. Estuaries are also strongly influenced by climatic and hydrologic stressors, including droughts, storms and floods. Clarifying how estuaries respond to these stresses is of importance for understanding processes and mechanisms controlling geochemical and biotic structure, function, and condition of these ecosystems. This understanding can greatly benefit from a spatially and temporally-intensive observational program, which, when coupled to modeling, will help predict future responses to external anthropogenic and climatic (hydrologic) perturbations. North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound System (PSS) is the Nation’s second largest estuary, and its largest lagoonal ecosystem. It exemplifies the impacts of large climatic perturbations and human development, including nutrient over-enrichment, eutrophication, algal blooms and hypoxia. In combination with an established Modeling and Monitoring Program (ModMon: www.marine.unc.edu/ims/modmon), a fleet of North Carolina DOT Ferries serves as a test bed for unattended monitoring of water quality, habitat and ecological condition of the PSS. FerryMon: (www.ferrymon.org), deploys multi-parameter (temperature, salinity, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyll a fluorescence) sensors coupled to discrete sampling of nutrients, organics, diagnostic photopigments and molecular indicators, to assess water quality in a near real-time manner. This test-bed project will enhance FerryMon’s ability to detect and quantify algal groups that dominate primary production and bloom dynamics. For more information, see: www.hydrologicscience.org/wtbs/wtbs11/index.html.
