CAREER: The Role of Groundwater Storage in Earth System Dynamics; Research to Improve Understanding of Current Hydrologic Regimes and Future Climate Response

职业：地下水储存在地球系统动力学中的作用；

• 批准号: 1945195
• 负责人: Laura Condon
• 金额: $ 49.53万
• 依托单位: University of Arizona
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-05-15 至 2025-04-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1945195&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Role; Groundwater; Storage; Earth

Groundwater is a critical water resource across the US and world-wide. Its natural interactions with surface water help stabilize our rivers and ecosystems. Despite its central role in the water balance, groundwater is hard to see, leading to much uncertainty on its availability. As a result, it is simply characterized in global models, and often misunderstood outside the hydrologic community. Though the need for better accounting of groundwater storage in global models has been widely acknowledged, there are still critical gaps in our understanding of how groundwater storage functions across large spatial scales and over long time periods. This uncertainty must be addressed to rigorously evaluate new modeling approaches and improve the hydrologic projections we make with global models. This project explores the role of groundwater storage in large scale models and develops tools to validate groundwater behavior in large coupled systems. The project will further develop ways to improve effective communication about groundwater to the public. We will use our modeling platforms as a resource to engage K-12 students in computer science with locally relevant water issues. The proposed research will quantify the role of large-scale storage dynamics in water and carbon cycles, which is an identified weakness of our current earth systems projections. More specifically, this project seeks to understand how storage dynamics control hydrologic regimes, and what role storage changes could play in future hydrologic regime shifts. Research will leverage the first fully integrated groundwater surface water model of the Continental US to develop direct comparisons with other large-scale modeling approaches and simplified groundwater representations over large spatial extents at varying spatial resolutions. This will provide unique insights on the impact of process representation and spatial resolution on global water and carbon projections not possible with previous approaches. The key outcomes of this research will (1) characterize the most sensitive hydrogeologic settings for simplification of groundwater approximations and spatial resolution, (2) map spatiotemporal ‘groundwater regimes’ across the US and analyze spatial controls, (3) analyze existing global model storage benchmarks, (4) quantify relationship between groundwater configuration and response to climate change, and (5) identify regions that are the most vulnerable to groundwater storage changes. In parallel with these technical outcomes this project will improve public understanding and engagement around groundwater sustainability. Broadcast meteorologists already regularly communicate hydrologic information with the general public. This project will provide training and broadcast resources on groundwater systems to this group, reaching a much larger and more diverse audience than would be possible through direct public outreach. Undergraduates at the UA will help develop broadcast materials through existing science communication courses, thus also providing exposure to hydrology for students outside of hydrology. Finally, the simulation platforms used here will be leveraged as a tool to engage high school students in local watershed issues while learning computer science and coding skills.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

地下水是全美乃至全世界的重要水资源。它与地表水的天然相互作用有助于稳定我们的河流和生态系统。尽管地下水在水平衡中起着核心作用，但人们很难看到它，这导致了它的可用性存在很大的不确定性。因此，它只是在全球模型中被描述为特征，而且经常在水文界之外被误解。尽管在全球模型中需要更好地核算地下水储存，但在我们对地下水储存如何在大空间尺度和长时间内发挥作用的理解上仍存在严重差距。必须解决这种不确定性，以严格评估新的建模方法，并改进我们用全球模型进行的水文预测。该项目探索地下水储存在大型模型中的作用，并开发工具来验证大型耦合系统中的地下水行为。该项目将进一步发展方法，改善与公众有关地下水的有效沟通。我们将利用我们的建模平台作为资源，让K-12计算机科学专业的学生参与到与当地相关的水问题中。这项拟议的研究将量化大规模储存动态在水和碳循环中的作用，这是我们目前地球系统预测的一个公认弱点。更具体地说，这个项目试图了解存储动态如何控制水文状况，以及存储变化在未来水文状况变化中可能发挥的作用。研究将利用美国大陆第一个完全整合的地下水地表水模型，与其他大规模建模方法进行直接比较，并在不同的空间分辨率下简化大空间范围的地下水表示。这将为进程表示和空间分辨率对全球水和碳预测的影响提供独特的见解，这是以前的方法所不可能做到的。这项研究的主要成果将(1)表征最敏感的水文地质环境，以简化地下水近似和空间分辨率；(2)绘制全美的时空“地下水状况”图并分析空间控制；(3)分析现有的全球模型存储基准；(4)量化地下水配置与气候变化响应之间的关系；以及(5)确定最容易受到地下水存储变化影响的地区。在取得这些技术成果的同时，该项目将提高公众对地下水可持续性的理解和参与。广播气象学家已经定期与公众交流水文信息。该项目将向这一群体提供关于地下水系统的培训和广播资源，其受众比通过直接公众宣传所能接触到的受众更多、更多样。亚利桑那大学的本科生将通过现有的科学传播课程帮助开发广播材料，从而也为水文学以外的学生提供接触水文学的机会。最后，这里使用的模拟平台将作为一种工具，在高中生学习计算机科学和编程技能的同时，让他们参与当地的分水岭问题。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Toward a Multi‐Representational Approach to Prediction and Understanding, in Support of Discovery in Hydrology

• DOI: 10.1029/2021wr031548
• 发表时间: 2022-12
• 期刊: Water Resources Research
• 影响因子: 5.4
• 作者: Luis De la Fuente;H. Gupta;L. Condon