Abstract

Water is an essential human resource and an agent of earth system processes that is playing an increasing role in global environmental and political issues (NRC 2004). As such there is a national need to provide seamless and fast access to essential geo-spatial/geo-temporal data to support the physics-based numerical models necessary to understand, predict and manage the nations surface and groundwater resources. The heterogeneity of data sources and access methods for data sources across multiple agencies has resulted in a lack of interoperability between data repositories required to support integrative data-intensive computation that addresses national and continental scale water problems.

In this paper we review the existing national data sets necessary to support catchment models that resolve upland stream features (hillslopes, 1st, 2nd and 3rd order streams), and make the case for a community adoption of the “Essential Terrestrial Variables” (ETV) necessary to support hydrologic modeling supported by national data anywhere in the US. The concept of ETV’s evolves from the WMO’s adoption of Essential Climate Variables.

We argue for a community approach for an integrated system of data sources that provides seamless access to the ETV data required to support water models at multiple scales across the continent (WMO, 2011).  We envisage collaborative data access arrangements with Federal and other data providers coupled to workflows to parse and repackage data into a form ready for use by models in near real time for retrospective investigation and for scenario development of climate and landuse change impacts.

Citation

Duffy, C. and Leonard, L.N. (2013): A call for a community strategy to the “Essential Terrestrial Variables” necessary for catchment modeling anywhere in the US (Invited). Abstract U42A-03 presented at 2013 Fall Meeting, AGU, San Francisco, CA, 9-13 Dec..

This Paper/Book acknowledges NSF CZO grant support.