Letter from the Executive Director
JERAD BALES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CUAHSI
Dear Friends of Water Science,
Well, the first Joint Hydrologics Sciences meeting (FIHM22) is history, although content still is available online for registrants (login, go to the schedule, select a session, go to watch the session replay).
As with any first-time event, there were a lot of lessons learned. Moreover, the challenges of planning and conducting a meeting during a pandemic cannot be overestimated. There were issues related to travel cost, which weren’t anticipated when the contract was signed with the San Juan convention center. In fact, San Juan was selected as the host to support the Puerto Rican economy, engage in discussions about Caribbean and island water issues, and because of the relatively low cost. There were “no-shows” and the expected difficulties in hosting a hybrid meeting, as some sessions were synchronously hybrid, fully online, and fully in person.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of successes to celebrate. Travel grants totaling $81,000 were awarded to students and early-career scientists, with $50,000 coming from NSF, $25,000 from CUAHSI, and $6,000 from AGU. Fifty-six students received grants along with 24 early-career scientists. About 10 percent of the awardees were from outside the U.S.
Six hundred persons attended on site, with 338 virtual participants, which we view as an excellent level of participation for a first meeting in the midst of a pandemic. There were 867 presentations across 231 sessions, as well as 23 Connect and Collaborate sessions, which were very well received. Many participants appreciated the longer time at the end of oral sessions for questions and discussions, as well as the panel format of the plenaries. Almost all the attendees who have responded to the post-meeting survey were interested in attending a future meeting, tentatively planned for 2024.
Thank you for your support of the meeting. Please let us hear from you, either through the post-meeting survey or help@cuahsi.org, as we think about the next meeting.
Take care, Jerad
Voices From The Community
ADMIN HUSIC, PhD
Assistant Professor, Water Resources Engineering, University of Kansas
While walking down the mile-long convention center in New Orleans during AGU’s 2021 Fall Meeting, I got into a conversation with Sarah Ledford about a data-sharing problem I had. In the year prior, a student and I had created a high-resolution geospatial dataset of hydrologic connectivity that spanned the conterminous United States (CONUS). The only problem was we had no idea how to get the data into the hands of other scientists in an easy-to-access manner. Sarah – a member of the Board of Directors – mentioned that I should visit the CUAHSI exhibit at the Fall Meeting and get their feedback. There, I met Clara Cogswell who connected me to other CUAHSI staff, Martin Seul and Austin Raney. Over the last few months, they have been incredibly helpful and created the exact kind of tool I originally envisioned. The hydrologic connectivity map of CONUS can now be accessed at: https://apps.cuahsi.org/connectivity-map/. This connectivity map was the final puzzle piece to a research paper I was working on, which has since been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters (an AGU journal), and is in press.
Working with CUAHSI has helped me translate – and make accessible – my work to a much broader audience, making it more impactful. While scientific advancements are crucial to furthering our understanding of hydrologic processes, ultimately our results must be made into usable tools for stakeholders. In my particular case, I want to educate land managers about the implications of hydrologic connectivity. Recent literature shows that over three-quarters of stakeholders were unaware of recent developments in connectivity research with half attributing the disconnect, at least in part, to a lack of data availability and practical methodology. This is a missed opportunity for scientists as nearly all stakeholders who are aware of connectivity-related linkages used that knowledge to influence their management. CUAHSI is an invaluable resource in this regard as its mission is the “interdisciplinary advancement of water science by making it easier for the water science community to do their work” – which it has certainly done for me!
As a tenure-track faculty, I have always been given the advice to be selective in choosing what collaborations to commit myself to. It can be easy to get lost in the endless possibilities. For me, working with CUAHSI has been one of the smartest collaborations I’ve taken on because it has connected me to other like-minded researchers, taught me to be a better steward of my data, and opened my eyes to new techniques for sharing my findings. While I am still in my first year of being involved with CUAHSI, I look forward to many more to come.
General Announcements
CIROH AWARD UPDATE
Dr. Kristin Raub was notified that her CIROH subproject, An Analysis and Demonstration of the National Water Model’s Applicability to Community Resilience Planning, will be funded beginning September 1. The work will be in partnership with the Global Resilience Institute at Northwestern University. The goal of the project is to better understand how communities, apply (or could apply) the National Water Model (NWM) to conduct resilience planning, to demonstrate a set of applications with local communities, and to investigate how the NWM could help address the prevalent lack of capacity that some communities face that prevents them from engaging in resilience planning. The project will be funded at $775, 000 for the first three years, with a potential for a total of $1.5M over 5 years.
INSTRUMENTATION DISCOVERY TRAVEL GRANT AWARDEES
Thank you to all that submitted proposals for the Instrumentation Discovery Travel Grant call. We had a great pool of applicants! Here are this year’s IDTG awardees:
- Jaclyn C. Fiola – Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
- Karla M. Jarecke – Oregon State University
- Aida Yahyavi Rahimi – Florida International University
- Marcela Strane – University of Houston
- John Tarricone – University of Nevada, Reno
METADATA AND HYDROLOGY
Want to make your research easier and more relevant? What would be the most useful metadata or hydro-tag for your research? Have your say by filling out this quick survey developed by Dr. Lina Stein and Thorsten Wagener, University of Potsdam, Institute of Environmental Science and Geography.
INFORMATICS BLOG
Big Data Dreaming! A 42-Year CONUS Hydrologic Retrospective
By: Aubrey Dugger, Research Applications Lab, National Center for Atmospheric Research
The latest NOAA National Water Model retrospective is a 42-year, >100 TB compendium of meteorological, land surface, and hydrologic states and fluxes across the Contiguous U.S. I've rounded up a handful of great example workflows for how to probe this rich data resource to help answer your looming scientific questions.
Read the full blog post here.
LINTON-POODRY SACNAS LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
 CUAHSI’s Education Program Manager, Veronica Sosa Gonzalez, has been accepted into the Linton-Poodry SACNAS Leadership Institute (LPSLI) and will be attending from July 17-22 in Washington D.C. The training, open to STEM professionals from populations that have been historically excluded and, as a result of exclusion, are underrepresented in STEM, will provide professionals tools and workshops for advancing their leadership of diversity, equity, and inclusion in all sectors of STEM.
CODE OF CONDUCT IMPLEMENTED
Have you signed up for a cyberseminar, participated in a workshop, or led a CUAHSI community event in the last couple of months? If so, you may have noticed the implementation of the CUAHSI Code of Conduct.
In April, CUAHSI established a Code of Conduct that reflects our values and sets standards for ethical behavior in all of our programs and services. Since then, we have asked all participants, leaders, volunteers, and staff to review and agree to follow these important standards. Thank you for your ongoing support in promoting a culture of integrity and inclusion in all we do!
Upcoming Events
NAVIGATING ACADEMIC WATERS CYBERSEMINAR SERIES
This free cyberseminar will help early career researchers better understand where and how to apply for a postdoc as a graduate student and how to excel in the position once they have it. More details can be found on our website, here.
- Date: August 11, 2022
- Time: 1pm - 2pm EDT
- Register
The second part in this series, Navigating Non-Academic Waters, taking place on September 8th, will be relevant for many career stages, whether you are a student seeking job opportunity information or a professional interested in switching to a non-academic job related to water. Panelists for this event will be announced soon.
- Date: September 8, 2022
- Time: 11am - 12pm EDT
- Register
COLLABORATION ON COMMUNITY DATA BEST PRACTICES
CUAHSI invites data managers, PIs, and graduate students to collaborate on the creation of data best practices. Community data best practices should reflect the input and practices of users, and reflect the data needs of a broad range of water science researchers. Please join us at the weekly Data Workshop (Zoom Link) on Wednesdays at 3pm EDT to take part in the creation of a set of water science data standards that will strengthen our data and our community!
The Critical Zone Hub has compiled data type specific best practices documentation on GitHub, which will apply broadly to the water science community. These documents are a work in progress, and will be refined each week during the Wednesday meetings.
Data types covered by the existing documentation include:
2022 FALL MEETINGS- CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
 Abstract submissions for the 2022 GSA Connects Fall Meeting, taking place in Denver, CO from October 9-12th, are now being accepted through July 19th. Please consider submitting an abstract for the below session, which has been endorsed by several organizations, including CUAHSI.
- T130. Coastal and Marine Hydrogeology in an Age of Rising Seas: From the Shore to the Oceanic Ridge
- This session aims to showcase theoretical and applied modeling and field studies in coastal and offshore settings around the world that consider seawater intrusion, inland flooding and hydrology, interactions with infrastructure, feedbacks with geology and ecology, tidal effects, benthic exchange, saltmarsh hydrology, and the identification of relevant parameters, boundary conditions, modeling strategies, and data collection and analysis approaches.
 Abstract submissions for the 2022 AGU Fall Meeting, taking place in Chicago, IL from December 12-15th, are now being accepted through August 3rd. Please consider submitting an abstract for the below session:
- H027 - Advancing understanding of mountainous critical zones through observations and experiments
- Globally, mountainous critical zones (CZs) provide important water and ecosystem services to downstream valley fill aquifers. However, a thorough understanding of surface and subsurface water quality and quantity and their relation to ecosystem services is presently not available. Lack of high-density observations of hydrologic fluxes, environmental tracers, water chemistry, and mineral weathering rates in mountainous regions further contribute to this knowledge gap. This session is intended to bring together researchers and scientists to advance the understanding of mountainous CZs through observations and numerical experiments.
HydroShare
NEW RELEASE 1.56
In these releases we added new functionality, addressed several bugs and applied several system reliability improvements:
New Functionality
- Extended the size of the Hydroshare content area to take advantage of larger monitors.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue to ensure the latest version of codes is loaded.
- Additional improvements to reduce the required time for deleting files.
- Substantially improves loading time for collection resources.
- Fixed an issue requiring the proper license agreement when selecting a custom license.
- Fixed a regression accessing resources when not logged in.
- FIxed an issue for group images to be limited in size.
HYDROSAHRE DATA SPOTLIGHT
Despite recent above normal rainfall in the upper basin, much of the Rio Grande basin remains in severe to exceptional drought. As of April, Elephant Butte reservoir, which is located near the New Mexico border, was at 8 percent of capacity. With these conditions, it is not surprising that a Rio Grande HydrorShare resource was one the most viewed resources during the last reporting period. The resource has been viewed 294 times and downloaded 6 times. The resource contains shapefiles that are used to support this publication, which inventories and reviews available water resource models used to meet multiple (and often competing) water resource management objectives in the Rio Grande basin.
CyberGIS-Jupyter for Water
2022 QUARTER 2 UPDATES
We are pleased to announce a new release of the CyberGIS-Jupyter for Water (CJW) platform at https://go.illinois.edu/cybergis-jupyter-water. This release includes several new capabilities and features summarized as follows:
- CJW was migrated to Jetstream-2 - an NSF-supported high-performance cloud computing resource, which allows users to enjoy a faster and smoother interactive computing environment;
- CyberGIS-Compute SDK is enhanced to support inspection of previously submitted computation jobs;
- WRFHydro model integration is now able to merge single-timestep outputs upon user request;
- Improved CJW backend enables users to quickly customize specific kernels using “pip install” in notebooks.
For details and examples, please refer to CJW 2022-Q2 Release Notes (full-version).
Calendar Dates
DON'T MISS THESE OPPORTUNITIES
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