Science Plan of the WATer and Environmental Research Systems Network (WATERS Network)

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

CBET-0838607 Dozier The WATERS Network is an initiative to transform science and engineering of the water environment. The goal is to create a national capability to better predict and manage the behavior of water-and its nutrients, contaminants, and sediments-everywhere in the U.S. Population growth, evolving land use, and climate change make the future water environment uncertain, so prediction and management require understanding along with statistical relationships, and thereby require integration among people who study how water moves and transforms landscapes; who manage and treat water to ensure potable supplies and prevent floods; and who consider how humans, institutions, and managed systems respond to and superimpose variability on quality, scarcity, or hazard. Driving the requirement for an integrated, collaboratively developed infrastructure is the recognition that we have to predict and manage water nationwide. Predicting Water Quality and Quantity Everywhere at All Times (WQ2EAT) requires a judicious integration of models and syn-thesis, cyberinfrastructure, education and outreach, existing networks, and remotely sensed data, along with new measurements, analyses, and experiments at a realistic number of carefully chosen sites or basins. A network of observational and experimental facilities, where processes are studied and manipulated, will provide knowledge that can be transferred to any location on the continent. The proposed network spans the domain of water environments-pristine, rural, and urban areas and constructed networks and facilities for management and treatment. The capacity for prediction ranges from episodic events such as floods and storm-water overflows, through seasonal spring runoff and surges of agricultural wastes, to multi-decadal projections. The task of the investigation is to create a prototype network design that will enable detailed specification and budgeting to prepare for a conceptual design review. The investigation will analyze existing sources of data across a domain representing the extant human-influenced water environment, conduct modeling exercises to identify new measurement needs and predict in locations where we lack intensive measurements, and scrutinize emerging technologies and different variables to observe at different scales. Alternative observational designs, as well as experimental facilities and campaigns, will be evaluated according to their capability to support key scientific objectives. The WATERS Network will help us understand and predict the ways in which heterogeneous processes interact with one another at different scales to produce the variability found in the water environment. Knowledge about explicitly scale-dependent processes will thereby inform options for management and engineering design. Water for human consumption, agriculture, and industrial processes is perhaps humanitys most fundamental need. Our traditional methods of predicting and managing water and its quality are based on statistical relations developed when human impacts were isolated and climate was relatively stable. These boundary conditions are changing, hence the need for new fundamental understanding. The WATERS Network focuses on the U.S., but the knowledge gained and the technologies developed will apply globally.