Integrating Multiscale Observations of U.S. Waters (2008) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 1-9
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Just as in balancing a bank account, it is important to keep track of the amount of water in storage and the rates of inflow and outflow. Natural inflows to surface water bodies typically include precipitation, surface runoff, and groundwater inflow; outflows include evaporation, transpiration, and seepage into the ground.
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Water Science and Technology Board (WSTB) formed the Committee on Integrated Observations for Hydrologic and Related Sciences to examine the potential for integrating new and existing spaceborne observations with complementary airborne and groundbased observations to gain holistic understanding of hydrologic and related biogeochemical and ecological processes and to help support water and related land-resource management.
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Identify processes in water flow and transport, related biogeochemical cycling, and ecological impacts where better information is needed to understand important mechanisms, how systems integrate at watershed and larger scales, and where new instrumentation or strategies for instrument placement could supply the needed data; (2) Identify contributions that observations obtained by remote sensing or other existing technology could make to understanding water flow and transport and related biogeochemical cycles as well as for addressing water management activities such as agricultural and municipal water supply, flood and drought prediction, water quality, and energy production; (3)
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• Finally, "Mountain Hydrology in the Western United States" discusses the need for high spatio-temporal resolution information on snow conditions due to sharp wet-dry seasonal transitions, complex topographic and landscape patterns, steep gradients in temperature and precipitation with elevation, and high interannual variability. These case studies, taken in the context of discussions of sensors, networks, communications, data assimilation, and modeling, illustrate a number of important challenges regarding current and potential sensors and sensor networks, merging the resulting information with models, and providing useful products to managers and policymakers through traditional and emerging dissemination media.
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Airborne remote sensing at NASA historically was viewed as an intermediate step between initial sensor development and space deployment to help develop retrieval algorithms to validate new satellite sensors. It has not been viewed as a sensor program in its own right.
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Funding Highly Interdisciplinary Science Interdisciplinary science is increasingly common, but the design and use of integrated hydrologic measurement systems in specific research applications adds complexity to the challenge. These new kinds of projects will require unprecedented interdisciplinary cooperation among electrical engineers, computer scientists, modelers and the physical, chemical, and biological scientists who apply technology to hydrologic research.
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Recommendation 4 Agencies should consider offering new funding streams for projects at the scale of several million dollars per year for approximately 5-10 years to help close the gap between sensor demonstration and integrated field demonstration. Recommendation 5 NASA should strengthen its program in sensor technology research and development, including piloted and unpiloted airborne sensor deployment for testing new sensors and as a platform for collecting and transmitting data useful for applications.
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Recommendation 11 NASA should take the lead by expanding support for the application of integrated satellite remote sensing data products. NSF, NOAA, and other federal and state agencies engaged in environmental sensing should likewise expand support for the creation of the integrated digital products that meet educational, modeling, and decision support needs.
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Summary 9 Recommendation 13 Water agencies should be alert for opportunities to incorporate new sensor and modeling technologies that will allow them to better deliver their mission and be more productive.
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