Review of Working Group Activities

1
Review of Working Group Activities

• G. D. Emmitt
• Chicago 2002

2
Milestones

• Spring 1999
• NASA Post-2002 LSH Planning Workshop in Irvine,
  CA
• Spring 2000
• Working Group proposal to LSHP (Emmitt,
  Lettenmaier and Vorosmarty)
• August, 2000
• First meeting in Greenbelt, MD

3
Milestones (cont)

• May, 2001
• Second meeting in Potomac, MD
• Summer 2001
• Team submitted three proposals to GWEC NRA (All
  three were unsuccessful)
• December, 2001
• Third meeting in Arcadia, CA
• Spring 2002
• Selected Doug Alsdorf to chair the WG

4
Science Objectives

• Improve global climate modeling through better
  diagnostics with global remotely sensed data
  products
• Advance hydrological forecasting on interannual,
  seasonal and daily time scales
• Improve understanding, characterization and
  prediction of the Earth system with hydrologic
  data of sufficient quality to enable
  quantification of
• human impacts on the terrestrial water cycle
• water cycle related biogeochemical processes and
  transports
• water related changes in the ecosystems
• changes in oceans due to changes in continental
  discharge

5
Data Objectives

• Primary data products
• fresh water storage
• fresh water discharge
• Primary remote observables
• water surface area
• water surface height
• surface velocity, surface slope

6
Planning Priorities

• Near term (lt1 year)
• document the data vision
• establish a model framework
• draft a science plan
• assess potential technology candidates
• identify pathfinder instruments
• plan for field demonstrations/sampling
  experiments
• Midterm (1-3 years)
• conduct the field experiments to assess
  observational strategies
• review and revise the observational requirements
• draft implementation plan

7
Research Priorities-Science

• Focus on rivers and lakes
• Develop strategy for assimilating land surface
  water data into diagnostic and predictive models

8
Research Priorities- Technology

• Trade studies on various altimeters
• Experiments to investigate remote sensing of
  water surface velocity
• Evaluation of various orbits and observational
  strategies for global coverage (consider a
  virtual mission)
• Investigate sensor, platform and data handling
  configurations

9
Field Experiments

• Needed to provide calibration of model based
  assessment of future sensors
• Needed to develop sampling strategies
• Needed to help LSHP to set research priorities

10
Modeling

• Critical for generating and justifying
  observational requirements to achieve various
  levels of impact (OSSEs)
• Places emphasis on the use of the data to improve
  predictive skills
• Places all proposed new observing systems in the
  context of current and approved instruments