Water Management Session: 16th Federation Meeting - Jan 4-6, 2006 Notes/Highlights

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

NASA Water Management Program

Presentation by Mayra Montrose, David Toll, Kristi Arsenault, Edwin Engman, Jon Triggs


Fundamental Research

Water and energy cycle

Applied Research

Science utilization

Improve predictions (water cycle)

  • Variables include: Soil moisture, snow water equivalent, surface runoff, evapotranspiration, rainfall

--Take data from Earth-Sun observations and plug into Earth systems models to make predictions and observations --

  • Groundwater = GRACE
  • Precipitation = TRMM/GPM
    • TRMM will lead to GPM for Global precipitation
  • Soil Moisture = Hydros (cancelled, hopefully be back in 07)
    • We plan to address soil moisture intensively - Hyrdos provides soil moisture and freeze/thaw info
  • Snow
  • Surface water
  • Snow-water equivalent measured by AMSR-E

--Sensors in concept CLPP mission

--Pathfinder proposed mission provides reservoir height and discharge estimates using 3 methods

  • Altimetry
  • Laser
  • Parallax interferometer approach

--Land Information System (LIS) high performance, high resolution (1 km) for local to global land modeling and data assimilation system

  • Follows ESMF modeling framework -- single or multiple processors
  • 5+ land surface models -- ingest different types of data sets, dependent on availability, model the data, outputs include: soil moisture, ET, Water availability parameters.
    • Goal is to get groups to use the suite more.

Data Assimilation

--Use with satellite data, or model data, in-situ data. Bring them all together to improve the overal output.

Model by itself has many imperfections...Use MODIS data to assimilate more accurately when compared to "truth" data. Satellite data improves the models.

NASA application partners:

  • Reclamation: Water supply, demand and forecast
    • Integration of NASA products: land cover, snow, ET, Streamflow, other
    • Ex. Land cover with snow cover to get LSM snow water equivalent
    • Used with NOAA Weather forecast model
  • EPA: non-point source water quality
    • MODIS vegetation index foliar biomass loss and nitrogen deposition
  • Army: global soil moisture (to 100m) trafficability
  • Dept. Agriculture: water supply forecast, drought assessment, agriculture

Parameters aren't physically based in other models, so they don't show up as well as they should in the end product

--Another project -- Improving NOAA/NWS river forecast center DSS with NASA satellite and land info system products

Satellites, Surface, In-situ sensing + grid computing + data mining + prediction models, DSS, critical applications = Integrated Environmental Information System

GCMD - Global Change Master Directory

GCMD

Need internal ESIP Federation Collaboration to see what the Federation actually has in its databases

CLEANER Project

Focused on hydrology and the built environment -- effects on quality/quantity

  • Trying to link up to a common portal to leverage the data
  • What is the science that we need to address those problems for engineering solutions?
    • Data is being collected. The idea is to have a network to do the large scale science.

--Hydrological community and Environmental engineering community

Cyber-collaboratory = worldwide network (electronic) to do near real-time collaboration for some issue that arises.


Q & A

Water areas are hard to get good data. What kind of information do water people need?

  • Work with key agencies that have use for water data (EPA, Reclamation, etc.)
  • Need Predictions, Water Availability (storage and flux of water accurately can provide a lot of good info), Extreme Events (floods/droughts)

Where are the gaps in the data that NASA is using for their models? Where should we collaborate or integrate?

  • Soil moisture, depending on the applications -- Hydros should improve models
  • Evaporation -- used MODIS but need to fix problems with it
  • Surface water proposed mission to look at water discharge/height

Ground truthing data? What could the federation do to help the water management interests that you have?

  • Solutions network, data information systems, transformations.
    • Make more interoperable
  • Bring the users and data suppliers together
  • Need a structure for the problem in order to create a structure to solve the problem

Who are the people involved? Who do they go to for information? How do we get known by them? Which levels of gov't are we aiming at? Fed, State, Local?

Work with key federal groups, what do they need? What will we need to give them what they need?

  • We need to justify the need for projects - quantify the issues with cost-benefit analysis.

If you're building a water mgmt community, there will probably be a number of sub-special interests, and they might cross at times, but there should be a number of distinct categories. Each agency has different foci (every single user has different sets of needs).

  • Many users don't have the time to do the research, etc. Therefore, we must make it easy to find data resources and get them into their hands. ESIP needs to make an interface to allow users to easily find the data they need, without having to translate into different formats.