National Water Center Innovators Program: Summer Institute

The National Water Center Innovators Program was established as a partnership between CUAHSI and the National Weather Service to help engage the academic research community in the enhancement of the National Water Model. The main activity of the Innovators Program is a seven-week Summer Institute (SI) at the National Water Center, which brings 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 affect the functioning of the National Water Model across the continental United States.

The first Summer Institute, originally called the National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE), was held June through July of 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. The prototype model 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 U.S., 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 to coast.

2018 will be the fourth Summer Institute. Students apply to attend the program in the fall. Selected students then plan to reside in Tuscaloosa for the seven week program from June through July. Students are grouped into teams organized around projects defined by the theme leaders and pre-selected topics. While there may be some overlap with the students' individual MS/PhD research projects, the expectation is that the work and research done during the Summer Institute will be a separate, self-contained project. 

The application for student participants will be available later in November of 2017. 

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 Technical Report highilighting student projects from the 2017 Summer Institute: National Water Center Innovators Program Summer Institute Report 2017 
• View the Technical Report highlighting student projects from the 2016 Summer Institute: National Water Center Innovators Program Summer Institute Report 2016 
• 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 the 2016 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.