CUAHSI ANNUAL REPORT 2 0 1 5 Universities Allied for Water Research ‘ This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant Nos. 07-53521, 12-48152, and 13-38606. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Cover Photo: Alaska, U.S., courtesy of Aaron Packman, Northwestern University. Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. 196 Boston Ave, Suite 3000 Medford, MA 02155, USA Tel: 339.221.5400 CUAHSI ANNUAL REPORT 2015 | 3 Letter from the President Dear Members, On behalf of the Board of Directors of CUAHSI, I am pleased to send you the annual report of our activities during 2015. As you review this report, evaluate how our services are helping you, or could help you, in your research and teaching. After more than a decade of working with the CUAHSI community, I have announced that I will step down as Executive Director of CUAHSI in February, 2017. A Search Committee has been formed and is currently seeking my successor. During this final year of my tenure, we will be working to document and to formalize our operations so that this transition can be handled smoothly. One aspect of this has been a modification in our mission statement to more concisely capsulize the role of CUAHSI in supporting our community. The three pillars of CUAHSI’s mission, which this annual report is organized around are: • Strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration • Developing and operating research infrastructure • Promoting water education and training Our biggest effort is in providing data services. Key accomplishments during 2015 include: • Release of a web application to access the data catalog (http://data.cuahsi.org). The next release, due before the Fall AGU meeting, will include a visualization feature to plot time series. • Release of the WaterML R-Library in the CRAN Repository for searching the catalog and downloading data directly into the R analysis environment by Jiri Kadlec and Dan Ames (Brigham Young University). • Establishment of a website developed by Venkatash Merwade (Purdue) and Ben Ruddell (Arizona State) and operated by Science Education Resource Center (SERC) (http://serc.carleton.edu/hydromodules/index.html) for data-based problem sets. We are soliciting contributions to that website and hope that you will find useful resources there. CUAHSI also offered a number of training classes during 2015, both in-person and online, the highlight of which in 2015 was the first Summer Institute at the National Water Center, the National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE). During a seven week period, students capitalized on new nationwide flood forecasting products to attempt to solve real world problems facing our nation today. In addition to taking a look at this opportunity and other classes planned for 2016, please reach out and propose to teach a class! CUAHSI will help you with all the course logistics and can offer limited support to subsidize the class, while you can focus on course content. Thank you for the opportunity to work with you all over the past several years. As always, we need your feedback on the how are services are helping you and how they can be improved. Please contact me or any CUAHSI staff members with suggestions. We look forward to hearing from you! Regards, Our Mission is to shape the future of hydrologic science by: • Strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration • Developing and operating research infrastructure • Promoting water education and training Richard P. Hooper, President 4 | CUAHSI ANNUAL REPORT 2015 Table of Contents Strengthening Multidisciplinary Collaboration Page 5 - 7 Developing and Operating Research infrastructure Page 8 Promoting Water Education and Training Page 9 - 15 About the Consortium Page 16 Governance Page 17 Board of Directors Page 18 Financial Overivew Page 19-20 Thank You Page 21 Staff & Contact Page 22 CUAHSI ANNUAL REPORT 2015 | 5 Strengthening Multidisciplinary Collaboration One of CUAHSI’s primary missions is to bring researchers from different disciplines together around the study of water. We do this through modeling efforts in addition to hosting regional membership meetings to continue building our community and open science meetings. Community Modeling CUAHSI is participating in two efforts that are exploring what “community models” mean for water science. Other scientific communities have used joint modeling activities effectively to advance science. Examples include the Weather Resources and Forecasting model in meteorology and the Community Climate Model (CCM) in climate science. Although the broad range of objectives for hydrologic models—from describing water movement for biogeochemical cycling to flash floods to design of structures—complicates what a community model means, the advantages to be gained by coordinating model development, model evaluation, and data provisioning for models justify addressing these challenges. The first activity, led by Ying Fan Reinfelder (Rutgers) and Martyn Clark (NCAR), is developing a branch of the Community Land Model (CLM) that elaborates the terrestrial hydrologic component of that model. A workshop, held in October at NCAR, brought together hydrologists working at hillslope to regional scales and global Earth System Model (ESM) land model developers to address two central questions: (1) What are the hydrologic stores and fluxes that are known to be essential to predicting large-scale water, energy, and biogeochemical fluxes but not yet adequately accounted for in Earth System Models (ESMs)? (2) How can we evaluate model performance meaningfully and transparently? Focusing on the Community Land Model (CLM), it was agreed that an immediate task is to capture the spatial hetero- geneity and lateral connectivity within a CLM grid (0.5-1.0 degree latitude-longitude) and that hydrologic observations differentiating and connecting uplands and lowlands, such as acquired from the Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs) and other research watersheds, must be utilized for testing model advances in a multi-scale/multi-variate framework. The HydroCLM project will (1) implement multiple columns within a CLM grid to capture the spatial variability and lateral convergence arising from the topographic structure, and (2) use data from CZOs and other research watersheds to evaluate the ability of the new multi-column CLM in representing sub-grid hydrologic behavior and consequences to grid-mean water, energy and carbon fluxes. The workshop also recognized the necessity for 2-way data and knowledge exchanges between the catchment science and the ESM communities. 6 | CUAHSI ANNUAL REPORT 2015 The second effort has focused on developing continental-scale hydrologic models for flood forecasting in coopera- tion with the National Water Center (NWC) of the National Weather Service (NWS). This work has involved a large number of scientists including David Maidment (University of Texas, Austin), Dave Gochis (NCAR), Dave Tarboton (Utah State), Ray Idaszak (RENCI, UNC), and Andy Ernest (University of Alabama), among others. The major activity under this effort was the National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE), a summer institute for graduate students that supported approximately 50 graduate students to participate at the NWC. Beyond the technical achievement of predicting streamflow at 2.3 million stream reaches (compared with the current flood forecasting system that makes predictions at less than 10,000 points), this effort supports new modes of research, the hydrology of now that focuses on forecasts. This work is continuing with the release of new streamflow prediction products by the National Weather Service planned for 2016. Upcoming Opportunities in Community Modeling • CUAHSI is currently soliciting theme leaders and course coordinators for the 2016 Summer Institute (https://www.cuahsi.org/summerinstitute/theme-leader-and-course-coordinator-applications) due December 28. Applications for students will be solicited in January 2016. • A Community Modeling Workshop will be held during the CUAHSI Biennial Symposium in July 2016 to solicit community input on both of these projects. Regional Meetings Because CUAHSI does not hold in-person business meetings, we have held regional meetings across 8 regions over the past 3 years. The purpose of these meetings is to engage the community in CUAHSI activities, both to inform them of the services offered and to get feedback from attendees on how to improve services and what additional services should be offered. Regional meetings were held for the Midwest (Illini Center of University of Illinois, Chicago; April 20th), Mid-Atlantic (Drexel University, Philadelphia; September 18th), and High Plains (Colorado School of Mines, Golden; October 12th). CUAHSI ANNUAL REPORT 2015 | 7 Science Meetings This past summer, the 3rd CUAHSI Conference on Hydroinformatics took place on the campus of the University of Alabama. At this meeting, researchers presented their current work in building cyberinfrastructure for water science including advances in data access, interoperability standards, data publication, model-coupling frameworks and workflow support. Additionally, this event served as a capstone for students that participated in the National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE), which is mentioned above. Student participation is described in Section IV, Promoting Water Education and Training.. Jiri Kadlec