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Executive Summary
The availability of water to sustain life and to fuel economies is perhaps the most important recurrent constraint in human history, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. During the past decade, an in-depth understanding of the water cycle, especially at regional scales, has emerged as a major scientific challenge within the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a federal effort to enhance understanding of the global environment and assess its possible evolution. As water is a critical component of other systems, it has emerged as a cross-cutting theme in the USGCRP. The global water cycle, now one of USGCRP's six fundamental program elements, offers two primary research challenges: (1) land-surface interactions and (2) atmospheric processes. Research in hydrologic science is primarily in the first area, an area that includes land surface-atmospheric coupling over a range of spatial and temporal scales and includes the role of the land surface state in climate variability and change. These challenges are important but limited. Broader challenges for hydrologic sciences that address cross-disciplinary research and recognize the integrative nature of terrestrial hydrology could strengthen the USGCRP.
Terrestrial hydrologic processes, specifically the storage and movement of water on land and within the terrestrial biosphere, are important across all of the USGCRP elements and should serve as a unifying physical process within the USGCRP. To meet these additional challenges, this report identifies two broad science areas that augment the current hydrologic sciences content of the USGCRP: (1) predictability and variability of regional and global water cycles and (2) coupling of hydrologic systems and ecosystems through biogeochemical cycles.
Predictability directly addresses the USGCRP priority of identifying possible future environmental change. This report recognizes current plans within the climate variability element but recommends additional research topics that can strengthen the long-term research goals of USGCRP. These additional topics include enhanced understanding of linkages in variability of global and regional hydrologic systems as the basis for producing improved predictions. The emphasis on variability and predictability, particularly in regional hydrologic systems, is designed to link the understanding of the global water cycle with emerging regional and local water resources issues.
Cross-disciplinary research involving hydrologic science is key to addressing challenges identified under both the USGCRP global carbon cycle and global water cycle elements. For example, terrestrial ecosystems exert a strong influence on the global water cycle through evaporation processes. Also ecosystem disturbances are likely to be a major pathway for any changes and shifts in water and chemical cycles re-
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sulting from human activity. The foundation for this research must be a better understanding of the water and chemical pathways and of hydrologic—ecosystem linkages and a new means of achieving this understanding. It is then possible to address the combined influences of climate change and land use change, which occur in the context of natural variability, on hydrologic systems and ecosystems.
The USGCRP should give high priority to developing effective measurement and data strategies specifically for the terrestrial component of the global water cycle. The strategies should address multiple needs, ranging from the detection of change to process studies to operational applications. Future planning for remote sensing and ground-based measurement networks should be integrated to give measurement strategies that are responsive to the priorities discussed above. This will require a high degree of interagency and international collaboration, and it will require new approaches to planning hydrologic measurements. Considerable attention also needs to be given to recovering and archiving hydrologic data and making the data available through effective data and information systems. These strategies need to integrate remote sensing and ground-based data, and they must be sustained over the long term.
Water issues are central to the USGCRP emphasis on global change and its impacts. Therefore water issues can help guide the evolution of new initiatives within the USGCRP. To yield effective results, concerted efforts need to be made to improve connections between hydrologic research and its applications.
