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Dear colleagues,
CUAHSI survived the heat wave and is here to bring you this month's hot topics!
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A Message from the Executive Director
Dear Friends of Water Science,
This month we have a guest columnist, Liz Tran, who is our Community Relations Specialist, to discuss CUAHSI’s communication plan, which Liz developed with input from our staff. The plan is an internal document, but represents our effort to reach out broadly and consistently.
Thank you, Liz, for doing this, as we push our renewal proposal to NSF out the door.
Jerad
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A Message from CUAHSI’s Community Relations Specialist
Dear Colleagues,
You may have received a few (or a lot) of emails from me…depends on who you ask, or met me at a training workshop or conference. I’m taking over Jerad’s column this month to tell you about something special that I’ve been working on for the past year…the launch of CUAHSI’s formal communications plan. CUAHSI has seen substantial growth over the past several years with its staff and services. With the growth, we see a need for cohesive and consistent branding and communications – something that has always been a bit ad hoc. As with anything, CUAHSI needed to evolve its communications to meet both the organization’s and community’s needs.
The overall goal of the plan is to highlight information and connect it with our community, measuring the effectiveness along the way. While I won’t bore you with the details, I’ll give you a few highlights that may be of interest:
- CUAHSI aims to increase the visibility of the hydrologic sciences community, as well as that of the organization, by expanding our audience. We’ve always been focused on the academic community whether it is educators, graduate students, or early career scientists. Over the years, we’ve seen a diversification in our audience and we’d like to continue to broaden our community by reaching out to audiences like undergraduate students, federal, regional, and local governments and laboratories, and private entities. While reaching out to these new audiences, we would also like to create partnerships with these individual members and organizations and see how we can expand our offerings to advance hydrologic sciences.
- We aim to bridge the gap between CUAHSI’s Community Services and Water Data Services. These two CUAHSI services have been operated somewhat separately and been treated as such. Well, that’s time to change. We have begun integrating Water Data Services into Community Services. Right now, that often constitutes a short presentation and demo at training workshops, but we aim to expand it across all programs and have instructors use it in their workshops or awardees use it to upload and share their research with others. For example, we offered extensive training in HydroShare at the 2018 Summer Institute, and have seen the students adopt HydroShare for collaboration and data access.
- We want to increase communications on our Water Data Services with more frequent announcements including release updates and new data uploads.
- We intend to spotlight the work of individuals and groups within the community that uses CUAHSI’s services.
No plan is perfect and we will certainly adjust as needed. One thing that will help ensure the success of the communications plan is YOU. While CUAHSI strives to ensure that our communications, programs, and services meet your needs, we want YOU to reach out to us – whether it’s to give feedback or to tell us how we helped you with your research or work. Please don’t hesitate as we’re always looking for success stories to share with others and on our website. As cheesy as it sounds, it warms my heart when I attend our training workshops or conferences and hear individual’s stories of how CUAHSI helped their research. That’s also how I learn that there are some community members who have used several of CUAHSI’s programs and services – not just one! I love what I do because of the CUAHSI community so please help us help you by keeping CUAHSI informed of how we can continue supporting you.
Best regards,
Liz Tran
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Submit an Abstract to a CUAHSI-Organized Session for the 2018 AGU Fall Meeting!
Submit an abstract for a CUAHSI-organized session, and you might be able to attend at the 2018 AGU Fall Meeting in Washington D.C. this December! Check out some of the sessions below;
- The Food-Energy-Water System Nexus and Decision Support for Sustainability
- Coupled Groundwater-Surface Water Processes in Continental-Scale Models
- Research, Development, and Evaluation of the National Water Model and Facilitation of Community Involvement
- Virtual Community Platforms and Tools for FAIR Data Management Planning: Supporting Your Research and Training the Next Generation
- Tools and Methods for Data-Driven Education
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CUAHSI's Master Class: Advanced Techniques in Watershed Science
Interested in a week-long course focusing on hydrologic watershed processes including theory, experimental design, and modeling? If so, keep reading for details!
When: January 13 - 18, 2019
Where: Biosphere 2, Oracle, AZ
A limited amount of $500 student travel grants are available on a first-come, first-served basis to help with the costs of travel to this course!
Registration information can be found below:
Early Bird Registration Deadline: October 1, 2018
Regular Registration Deadline: October 15, 2018
Need more information? Visit here!
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Training Workshop: The Community WRF-Hydro Modeling System
This training workshop will provide graduate students and early career scientists with formal instructions on the structure and application of the WRF-Hydro system and will offer hands-on experience in setting up and running the system for several different research and prediction applications.
A list of a few topics covered during the workshop can be found below:
- Conceptualization and structure of the WRF-Hydro system
- Model porting and compilation, and an overview of parallel computing with WRF-Hydro
- Hands-on model configuration and execution
- Overview of model calibration
When: October 23 - 26, 2018
Where: NCAR in Boulder, CO
Applicants must apply to attend! Deadline to apply is 5:00 p.m. EDT on July 31, 2018. Visit here to apply now!
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CUAHSI's Data Down-low
Discover Newly Published Data Sets!
Visit data.cuahsi.org to discover newly published atmospheric, biota, nutrient, physical, chemical properties, model-derived, and sediment data sets!
Corpus Christi Bay Environmental Flows and Hypoxia
The Harte Research Institute's Corpus Christi Coastal Bend database was created to help support management decisions for two issues: 1) managing environmental flows to the Rincon Bayou, the Nueces Delta, and Corpus Christi Bay, and 2) managing Hypoxia (i.e., low oxygen conditions) in the southeastern region of Corpus Christi Bay. The data spans from 1994 to 2009. The data contains over 600,000 distinct different variable types grouped below into five general categories: atmospheric, biota, nutrients, water physical-chemical properties, and sediments. For more information, click here.
Aquatic Habitat, Climate & Water Analysis Laboratory
Monthly time series of water, delivery, scarcity, reservoir storage, aqueduct conveyance, and hydropower generation for California if O'Shaughnessy Dam is removed from San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy System and replaced with improved water conveyance at the watershed, regional, or statewide scales. Data is optimized using CALVIN, a large-scale hydro-economic water management model. For more information, click here.
Mobile Hydrology
Mobile Hydrology, led by Northern Arizona University and Michigan Technological University, enables volunteers and students to set up their own gauges and provide observations of the stage of a stream, river, wetland, or retention basin. There are now over 20,000 citizen science observations available through data.cuahsi.org. Additional photographs and image processing that enrich the data collection can be found here. For more information, click here.
Note that Mobile Hydrology will merge with the University at Buffalo’s CrowdHydrology. Both are being used in the 2018 Summer Institute.
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Exciting News for the Data Services Team!
Hydroshare was recently mentioned as a repository option for data in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in this journal!
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CUAHSI-AGU H3S Cyberseminar
Cyberseminar: H3S, AGU, and You: Navigating the 2018 AGU Fall Meeting as a student or early career Hydrology Section member
Are you a student or early career AGU Hydrology Section Member? If so, you have representation in the Hydrology Section Student Subcommittee (H3S).
Join us for this Cyberseminar for an interactive conversation where you can learn more about the role HS3, hear about planned events at the 2018 Fall Meeting, ask questions and have your voice heard in the broader Hydrology community!
Interested? Free registration here!
When: Thursday, September 27, 2018 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. EDT
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Meet the CUAHSI Community
This is the next installment of our series as we shine the spotlight on a member of the CUAHSI community.
[Know a CUAHSI member that deserves to be highlighted? Contact commgr@cuahsi.org with a nomination!]
The Pathfinder Fellowship began to enable graduate students in the water science community to go beyond one site, one view. Now in its 10th year of funding, the program has funded 70 Fellows whose research reflects the diversity of water science within the CUAHSI community. Thanks to the advancement of CUAHSI’s Water Data Services, we now can take a holistic approach to this program and require a Data Management Plan, which better prepares our Fellows for the requirements of other funders like the National Science Foundation. This month’s Meet the CUAHSI Community introduces you to one of our 2017 Fellows, Ryan Crumley. Ryan’s Fellowship enabled him to create an additional observational dataset to be integrated with a physically-based snow process model, which also leverages snow depth measurements from citizen scientists. To learn more, visit the Community Snow Observations website, listen to this NPR feature, and watch this clip from Seattle Channel.
This month’s Meet the CUAHSI Community introduces you to one of our 2017 Fellows, Ryan Crumley, a Ph.D. candidate in Water Resources Science at the Oregon State University
What are your research interests? / What types of projects are you currently involved in?
My research is centered on understanding seasonal snow processes in data-sparse, remote, mountainous regions of the world, including Alaska, the Western U.S., the Central Andes, and the Central Asian Himalayas. All of my projects involve snow remote sensing, snow fieldwork and observations, and simulations of snowpack conditions using modeling. One of the current projects uses a MODIS satellite snow product to generate two global-scale snow metrics using Google Earth Engine’s cloud computing capabilities. Another current project was partially funded by the CUAHSI Pathfinder Fellowship, which involves backcountry skiers and snow professionals in a citizen science campaign to measure snow using basic avalanche safety equipment and a smart-phone app (www.communitysnowobs.org). I am using those citizen scientist measurements as inputs for a physically-based snow model that simulates snow conditions throughout the year in a region of the Chugach Mountains near Valdez, Alaska. I care about this research because improving snow modeling and snow remote sensing will potentially impact our ability to predict and quantify snow-based runoff for water resource management purposes, which is an ongoing, major challenge for much of the Western U.S. and elsewhere.
Why should others get involved with CUAHSI?
CUAHSI has given me the ability to design and pursue my own fieldwork ideas for my Alaskan citizen science research project. I may not have had the opportunity to visit our field site in the Chugach mountains, or the possibility to take three weeks of field measurements during the 2018 snow season without CUAHSI’s assistance. In this way, CUAHSI has expanded the potential impact of the research that I am conducting for my dissertation by adding depth and financial support. These are all great reasons for other students to get involved with CUAHSI.
What has been your proudest professional accomplishment to date?
My proudest professional accomplishment has been successfully changing my career path in my early thirties, from legal assistant and non-profit work to hydrologic science. It took many years of pre-requisite studies in physics, math, and earth sciences before I was able to begin my master’s degree. I accomplished these things while continuing to work part-time before graduate school and it was one of the most difficult challenges of my adult life. Remembering all that initial hard work and years of effort has kept me motivated through my master’s and Ph.D. research.
Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to graduate students who are embarking on careers in water science?
Knowing what I know now about graduate school, I would tell new graduate students to make sure they are choosing a topic or research subject that will never get old to them, especially if they embark on a Ph.D. program. If that does not exist for them, then maybe don’t go to graduate school. Learning new programming languages or statistical software packages or methodologies just so you can run a model or produce a figure or quantify interview data is tedious and incredibly boring at times. It’s important to want to arrive at the end product: knowledge production within a very specific subject area, one that is important to you personally or to society as a whole or to our social & physical science theory. If you can’t personally find the meaning in what you are doing, you may not want to spend year after year of your life pursuing that goal.
What are some of your favorite hobbies outside of work?
Living in Corvallis, OR for my Ph.D. program affords me the opportunity to take advantage of some of my favorite hobbies. I trail run all year long, rain or shine, on the myriad forest service trails that are minutes from my door. Backcountry skiing on the nearby Cascade volcanos lures me away from my desk during the spring and early summer months. Smith Rock has world class rock climbing with hundreds of routes, and I’ve spent countless spring and fall weekends there with friends. The Willamette River runs through downtown Corvallis and every summer brings once-a-week canoe floats with sightings of osprey, bald eagles, beaver, and herons. When I’m not doing these things, I’m often playing music.
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