The contiguous United States has water resource management challenges that are being exacerbated by a changing and growing population, climate change, land-use and landcover change, inadequate or aging infrastructure, and evolving socioeconomic drivers. These changes to water supply and demand dynamics impact policy setting and decision making at different governing and executive levels across the enterprise. To inform adaptive water management policies, best practices, and infrastructure development, advanced water monitoring and forecasting capabilities are needed. The focus of this session is to identify and address observational and modeling gaps in support of continental to global scale water resource monitoring and prediction, with a strong focus on the contiguous USA. 

The session aims to bring the observational and modeling communities together to advance the state of the science and our predictive capabilities of water availability. As such, submissions are invited that explore co-design, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to water cycle science that lead to a better understanding and quantification of water availability now and in the future. Of particular relevance are papers that explore ways to evaluate, improve and integrate existing surface observational networks across regional to continental scales, in the context of terrestrial-based and spaceborne remote sensing, and in support of Earth system modeling of the water-cycle, in order to better support regional, national and global operational weather and hydroclimate monitoring and modelling efforts. For example, approaches including observational verification, parameterization development, data assimilation, observing system design, and employing in situ observations to provide physical process constraints not currently possible/available from satellite observing systems, are welcome. Linking the socio-economic and physical sciences and demonstrating the added-value of new approaches in the context of water policy and operational management applications are also relevant. It is recognized that studies over more limited spatial and temporal scales do lead to an improved characterization of the water cycle at continental to global scales and at time periods encompassing climate, and such papers are also encouraged.

Submitters:  Timothy L. Schneider; Sarah A. Tessendorf, NCAR, Boulder, CO and Petrus Oevelen, Atmospheric, Oceanic & Earth Sciences Department, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

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