RII Track-1: Ike Wai: Securing Hawaii's Water Future

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Non-technical DescriptionThis project, titled Ike Wai from the Hawaiian words for knowledge and water, will address the critical needs of the state to maintain its supply of clean water, most of which comes from groundwater sources. This supply is under increasing pressures from population growth, economic development, and climate change. Effective management of water resources requires detailed understanding of the underground geologic features that determine the flow paths of subsurface water; these features are particularly complex in Hawaii due to its volcanic origins and history. This project will greatly improve understanding of where the water that provides for the needs of Hawaii?s cities, farms, and industries comes from and how to ensure a continued, high quality supply. The project team will engage and collaborate with federal, state, and local agencies and community groups concerned with water management. Training and education initiatives will prepare a diverse workforce capable of meeting the research and policy-making challenges of the future.Technical Description The overarching scientific goal of this project is to generate more accurate and detailed models of Hawaii?s aquifers, water flow, and transport processes. Geophysical imaging will be used to produce high-resolution 3D maps of subsurface geologic structures. Aquifer volume, flow, and connectivity will be measured by well monitoring, geochemical and submarine groundwater discharge analyses, and the use of microbial diversity as a novel groundwater tracer. The project will also establish the Integrated Knowledge Environment, a centralized cyberinfrastructure platform for data storage, high performance computation, numerical modeling, and visualization. This resource will include data from the project as well as legacy and new data from governmental agency collaborators, and will serve as a tool for both research and water management decision support. The modeling tools and knowledge gained through this project will be extensible to other volcanic Pacific islands. The project will provide training in geophysics, hydrology, and data science to undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, and also provide career development mentoring to these groups and junior faculty. Emphasis will be placed on the recruitment and retention of women and under-represented minorities, particularly Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders.