Presented at the Spring 2004 Meeting of the American Geophysical Uniton Meeting, Montreal Canalda, May 18, 2004

H24B-04 1615h Designing Observatories for the Hydrologic Sciences
Richard P. Hooper (rhooper@cuahsi.org) CUAHSI, 2000 Florida Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009, United States

The need for longer-term, multi-scale, coherent, and multi-disciplinary data to test hypotheses in hydrologic science has been recognized by numerous prestigious review panels over the past decade (e.g. NRC’s Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science). Designing such observatories has proven to be a challenge not only on scientific, but also technological, economic and even sociologic levels. The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) has undertaken a “paper” prototype design of a hydrologic observatory (HO) for the Neuse River Basin, NC and plans to solicit proposals and award grants to develop implementation plans for approximately 10 basins (which may be defined by topographic or groundwater divides) during the summer of 2004. These observatories are envisioned to be community resources with data available to all scientists, with support facilities to permit their use by both local and remote investigators. This paper presents the broad design concepts which were developed from a national team of scientists for the Neuse River Basin Prototype. There are three fundamental characteristics of a watershed or river basin that are critical for answering the major scientific questions proposed by the NRC to advance hydrologic, biogeochemical and ecological sciences: (1) the store and flux of water, sediment, nutrients and contaminants across interfaces at multiple scales must be identified; (2) the residence time of these constituents, and (3) their flowpaths and response spectra to forcing must be estimated. “Stores” consist of subsurface, land surface and atmospheric volumes partitioned over the watershed. The HO will require “core measurements” which will serve the communities of hydrologic science for long range research questions. The core measurements will also provide context for shorterterm or hypothesis-driven research investigations. The HO will support “mobile measurement facilities” designed to support teams of investigators to explore new and more narrowly focused hypotheses, including but not limited to, experimental campaigns for identifying constitutive relations across scale, or testing of theoretical models. The core measurement data will be available to the community in as quickly as possible. Science teams which develop new non-core data will have priority for a specific period of time (e.g. completion of PhD or publication priority) before it is made available to the wider community. Core data will be subject to quality assurance standards to ensure comparability across all HO’s. Collection of the core data and its publication will be carried out by scientists and technicians employed by the HO, independent of the local investigators. Criteria for selection among proposed HO’s include (1) effectiveness of design to estimate characteristics at large scale, (2) breadth and interdisciplinary nature of hypotheses, (3) proportion of proposed data collection that will be core data, (4) leveraging of existing data and local resources, (5) institutional support of government and stakeholders, (6) innovation of proposed interpretive frameworks, such as models, and use of benchmark models as performance metrics, (7) innovative sensors and instrumentation networks, and (8) education and outreach opportunities.