About SEDS
Science, Education, and Design Strategy for the WATer and Environmental Research Systems Network (SEDS) - February 27, 2008
• Main document (draft)
• Appendices
(excerpt from the Executive Summary)
WATERS Network and Grand Challenges
The Earth’s water environment, or region of the land surface directly influenced by freshwater, from the outer limits of vegetation down to and including groundwater, is a heterogeneous assembly of natural and human systems that both shape and are shaped by life on Earth. Our water environment is no longer dictated simply by natural forces: the water cycle on our planet is now a function of both natural—climate, tectonic—as well as anthropogenic interactions and forcings. In this zone, a complex and interacting suite of chemical, biological, physical and human processes combine to sustain life on Earth. Social forces both determine and respond to the water environment.
The WATERS Network is a bold environmental observatory initiative to transform research on the water environment through new infrastructure investments to enable investigations that cannot be done under the current single-investigator or collaborative projects that are the foundation of NSF’s research programs. The WATERS Network responds to grand challenges in environmental research, and recognizes that the foundation for advances in water-related natural sciences, engineering and social sciences can only be built on new measurements.
Read more at:
• Main document (draft)
• Appendices
You can click on individual chapter to the right (under “Categories”) to enter specific comments pertaining to those sections. Thank you.
From Scientific Basis of Water Management, NRC, 1982:
“Hydrology deals with the distribution and properties of water moving through the natural system, conceived to be the hydrologic cycle. But it must be recognized that human activity is inseparable from these concerns, both influencing and affected by them, both intentionally and inadvertently. This is in direct contrast to the traditional paradigm, which holds human enterprise to be a thing apart from the hydrologic cycle. The active paradigm to be adopted is one that recognizes that human activity is inherently a part of the natural system. Furthermore, the quality (physical, chemical, biological) of water is as central a concern in hydrology as the quantity of the water mass, affecting and being affected by it.” p.125
“It is easy to say that more fundamental research is needed to provide a firmer basis for hydrologic predictions. More to the point is the need for assuring a scientific basis in the conduct of public affairs concerning water resources.” p. 122
N.C.Matalas, J.M.Landwehr and M.G. Wolman, 1982, “Prediction in Water Management”, Chapter 11 in Scientific Basis of Water Management, Studies in Geophysics, National Academy Press, Washington D.C.
Comment by J.M. Landwehr — March 3, 2008 @ 2:43 pm
Hydrology also deals with the fate of the distribution of rainfall upon the earth’s surface. That rainfall comes from the atmosphere. The water for the rainfall is either advected to a region from oceanic areas OR from the land itself via evapotranspiration. In other words there is a feedback loop, a complex one, within the atmosphere-hydrological domains. That land-atmosphere loop cannot be neglected in this effort…at least I hope so.
Comment by Robert L. Grossman — April 1, 2008 @ 6:24 pm