International Symposium on Observations and Modeling of Land Surface Water and Energy Exchanges across Scales: Learning from the past and looking to the future

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The planned symposium will focus on advances in observations and modeling of land surface exchanges of both water and energy. It will explore societal connections to operational hydrology, including data assimilation approaches for improving hydrological forecasting for water management, as well as for drought and flood prediction. It is expected that the symposium will attract more than 150 attendees from around the world, including from developing regions. The symposium keynote/invited speakers will be specifically asked to reflect on past progress, future challenges, and emerging new opportunities, which will form the basis for a synthesis paper that will serve as a major milestone in hydrologic research. In the past ~25 years there has been an expansion of research in process understanding, observations and predictions at a range of scales related to land surface water and energy exchanges. The space-time variability in precipitation interacts with the spatial heterogeneity of landscapes to produce spatially and temporally variable fields of runoff and soil moisture. This variability impacts many areas of hydrologic research including flood and drought estimation, water resource management, climate change impact assessments, and water quality predictions. Land-atmosphere interactions also affect the linkages between land surface states and fluxes, as well as transport through the atmospheric surface and boundary layers and the associated modulation of convection, clouds and precipitation. These interactions operate over decision-relevant time scales, from diurnal (weather) to seasonal and inter-annual (climate). The planned symposium will review and synthesis progress and new knowledge in this field. The meeting will bring together multiple generations of scientists covering the scope of the problem. The results focusing on hydrologic predictability and its relationship to land surface memory, land-atmosphere interactions, global teleconnections and climate predictability as well as the human impacts on hydrologic variability and extremes, and associated coupled human-water system feedbacks will be a significant contribution to the field of hydrometeorology.