National Water Center Innovators Program: Summer Institute

The Office of Water Prediction of the NOAA National Weather Service has developed a National Water Center on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama to serve as the hub for the building of a National Water Model of the United States, and has established a National Water Center Innovators  Program with CUAHSI to engage the academic community in research to enhance the National Water Model. The key activity of the Innovators Program is a 7-week Summer Institute at the National Water Center, bringing a group of graduate students together with faculty advisors and National Water Center staff to conduct group projects that involve rapid prototyping of new ideas. The intent is to create an innovation incubator where students from many universities can exchange ideas and advance concepts that, although they may be analyzed only for a short time and on a small study area, are illustrative of issues that will affect the functioning of the National Water Model across the continental United States.

The first Summer Institute was held in June-July 2015, and focused on the formation of a prototype National Water Model running in the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin, which demonstrated that the discharge on 2.7 million stream reaches of the United States could be simulated and forecast in real-time using input precipitation and weather information produced by NOAA and a computational framework called WRF-Hydro developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The key innovation demonstrated at the first Summer Institute was a hybrid grid-catchment information framework for the National Water Model in which the land-atmosphere computations were carried out on square grid cells covering the continental US, and the resulting runoff was geographically  transformed onto the 2.7 million catchments of the National Hydrography Dataset Plus (NHDPlus) and routed through the NHDPlus stream network. It was shown that the continental stream network could be treated in real-time as a single flow continuum, from atmosphere to oceans and from coast.

If you are interested in learning more about the Summer Institute, please take a look at the following resources:

• View the recorded presentations as part of CUAHSI's 2016 Fall Cyberseminar Series Featuring the National Water Model
• View the National Water Center Innovators Program Summer Institute Report 2016 - CUAHSI Technical Report 13
• Take a look at the Story Map describing the experiences of the 2016 Summer Institute Fellows
• Watch this short video that was put together by last year's Summer Institute Fellows

Questions regarding the Summer Institute can be sent to commgr@cuahsi.org. 

The schedule below is meant to be provided as an example for prosepective Summer Institute applicants:

Applications will be accepted from current and incoming graduate students and post-docs within three years of graduating with their PhD. Applicants must be affiliated with US universities. Applicants who are not US citizens will need to report their visa status. Due to security regulations, all accepted Fellows will be contingent upon a foreign national visitor approval process. Upon acceptance into the program. all participants will need to provide additional security clearance documents and fingerprints. 

Additionally, students must be able to reside on-site at the University of Alabama for the entire program. 

Students selected to participate in the Summer Institute will receive room, board, and tuition to attend the SI. Dorm-style lodging will be provided at the University of Alabama. Students will have their own bedrooms, but will share a living suite. Due to the scale of the program, CUAHSI is unable to accommodate requests for single occupancy suites or housing for spouses or children. 

The award also includes travel expenses for the student's advisor to make a trip to attend the bootcamp or Capstone event. 

Application information and instructions will be posted in the fall of 2017.

Below are the 2017 Theme Leaders responsible for content development for this year's Summer Institute: 

	David Maidment University of Texas at Austin Technical Director  Flood Inundation Theme Leader
	Emily Clark CUAHSI Course Coordinator
	Fred Ogden University of Wyoming Hyper Resolution Simulation in Cities Theme Leader
	Jim Nelson Brigham Young University Communicating National Water Model Results Theme Leader
	Sarah Praskievicz ​University of Alabama Activities in Tuscaloosa Theme Leader
	Sagy Cohen University of Alabama Activities in Tuscaloosa Theme Leader