CAREER: CAS-Climate: Socio hydrology to link climate change and its societal impacts

水在气候变化与其最严重的社会影响（包括粮食短缺、移民和冲突）之间起着中介作用。然而，关于降雨模式的具体变化如何导致水过剩或不足，并有可能引发此类危机，仍然存在问题。研究气候变化的原因和社会影响的学科之间缺乏整合。在气候影响研究中，气候变量通常被直接用作水资源可用性的替代指标，从而忽略了水文学在抑制（或放大）气候变化影响和塑造人们对气候变化的反应方面的重要作用。该项目开发了水文学所需的理论、经验、实验和教育工具，以便正确利用水文学来理解和减轻气候变化的社会影响。这些新工具纳入了目前尚未同时解决的气候相关危机的四个关键水文特征：地方规模、非固定驱动因素、人-水反馈和数据稀缺。该项目为一名研究生和九名本科生提供跨学科培训，并制作了宝贵的教育和宣传材料（包括一个基于网络的模拟策略类游戏），供水文学以外的研究人员、决策者和社区教育工作者使用。在理论领域，该项目通过将人-水反馈纳入广泛使用的基于过程的集水区规模蓄水动态概率模型，澄清了灌溉取水对水流状态变化的影响。在经验领域，该项目引入了统计工具，以利用自然实验进行观察研究中的因果推断。这使得数据有限地区的水文变化能够事后归因于其自然和人为驱动因素。在实验和教育领域，基于网络的模拟策略类游戏将作为一个实验平台，以确定水文变化特性与用水者对其反应之间的关系。该游戏将同时作为一个开放平台，以整合大规模的研究、推广和教育。该项目将用于高中和本科教育，并用于支持美国和国外水资源和政策专业人员的气候准备培训。该项目由GEO/BRC水文科学计划和SBE/BCS人类环境和地理科学计划共同资助，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得的。通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，

Water mediates the relation between climate change and its most dramatic societal impacts, including food shortages, migration, and conflict. Yet, questions remain about how specific changes in rain patterns can cause excess or insufficient water with the potential to beget such crises. There is poor integration between disciplines studying the causes and societal impact of climate change. Climate variables are often directly used as proxies for water availability in climate impact studies, thus missing the important role of hydrology in dampening (or amplifying) the effect of climate change and shaping people's response to it. This project develops the theoretical, empirical, experimental, and educational tools necessary for hydrology to be properly leveraged to understand — and mitigate — the societal impacts of climate change. These new tools incorporate four key hydrologic characteristics of climate-related crises that are not currently simultaneously addressed: local scale, non-stationary drivers, human- water feedback, and data-scarcity. The project provides interdisciplinary training for one graduate and nine undergraduate students and creates valuable education and outreach material (including a web-based simulation game) for easy use by researchers, policy makers and community educators outside of hydrology. In the theoretical realm, the project clarifies the effect of irrigation withdrawals on changing flow regimes by incorporating human- water feedbacks into a widely used process-based probabilistic model of catchment-scale water storage dynamics. In the empirical realm, the project introduces statistical tools to leverage natural experiments for causal inferences in observational studies. This allows hydrological changes in data-limited regions to be attributed ex-post to their natural and anthropogenic drivers. In the experimental and educational realms, the web-based simulation game will serve as an experimental platform to determine the relationship between the properties of hydrological change and water users’ response to it. The game will simultaneously serve as an open platform to integrate research, outreach, and education at scale. It will be leveraged for high school and undergraduate education and used to support climate preparedness training for water and policy professionals in the US and abroad.This project is jointly funded by the GEO/EAR Hydrologic Sciences Program and the SBE/BCS Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program, with additional support from the Directorate of Education and Human Resources.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.