North American Water Program (NAWP)
Solutions for North America’s freshwater sustainability challenges
September 2012
I am currently helping to develop the North American Water Program (NAWP), that will establish the scientific basis, observation, modeling and decision approaches needed to manage water security and sustainability through climate, population and environmental change uncertainties.
Motivation: We lack the water storage and flux knowledge, prediction skill and science-informed water management methods to adequately address North America’s freshwater sustainability challenges. Atmospheric processes, terrestrial rivers and hydroclimactic processes transcend eco-regions and political boundaries requiring a continental-to-global scale hydroclimate synthesis.
Vision: Establish the scientific basis, observation, modeling and decision approaches needed to manage water security and sustainability through climate, population and environmental change uncertainties.
Objective: An interdisciplinary integration of North American hydroclimate observation and prediction resources that transcends scales and enables procedures and analytic tools to adapt to change.
Science Question: How does climate, environmental and population change affect the water cycle across scales, to what extent is it predictable, and can we adapt to achieve freshwater sustainability?
Challenges:
- Adaptation: Develop the scientific basis and tools to adapt to climate, population and environmental changes in the water cycle.
- Benchmarking: Assess water storage and quality dynamics, understand the sensitivity of the water cycle to change, and evaluate model skill for improved hydrologic predictions
- Science informing decisions: Develop the capacity for science-informed sustainable water management practices in the face of climate, population and environmental change.
Implementation:
- Quantify: Systematically quantify North American water storages and fluxes; develop records of atmosphere, water, land and energy-related quantities, including uncertainty estimates.
- Understand: Analyze variations, trends and extremes in the water cycle, and determine the impacts of the specific adaptation measures on water resource and related sectors.
- Predict: Improve continental precipitation, cloud and hydrology prediction through accelerated development of coupled atmospheric and land models; Develop advanced hydroclimate models that seamlessly ingest observations to monitor and forecast water availability and change.
- Solutions: Develop and transition new observations, models, diagnostic tools and methods, and data management tools to national operational applications.