Global Centers Track 2: Building the Global Center for Forecasting Freshwater Futures

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Climate change is degrading water quality in lakes and reservoirs around the globe, motivating the urgent need for new approaches to predict future ecosystem and drinking water conditions for management. This Global Centers Track 2 Design project will create the groundwork for developing a global center to provide scientists, managers, and the public in the U.S. and Australia with state-of-the-art, real-time water quality forecasts and decision support tools for lakes and reservoirs. The system will be deployed and tested at four lakes facing a range of climate change threats. Daily forecasts will be generated for a suite of water quality variables and methane emissions, which can inform adaptive monitoring and preemptive management (e.g., divert water from other reservoirs, increase water flows to reduce methane production). Interactive educational materials will be developed and assessed to train managers and community members on freshwater forecasting. A broad community of American and Australian students, academic researchers, government officials, industry representatives, water managers, and the public will be engaged in all center activities, setting the stage for future global engagement via partnerships with multiple international initiatives. The project’s overarching goal is to develop the foundation for an international forecasting center that predicts lake and reservoir water quality across the U.S. and Australia to enable climate change adaptation and mitigation. Lakes in both the U.S. and Australia are experiencing severe, detrimental effects of climate change, motivating the need for a future Global Center that integrates unique water quality models, sensor networks, and research networks across the two countries. As part of the center’s design and planning activities, researchers from six U.S. and Australian organizations will work together to scale existing resources (forecasting software, lake ecosystem models, sensor networks, translational tools, and training programs) to create forecasts for four focal lakes in the U.S. and Australia that are experiencing extreme water quality changes due to altered climate. The center will advance fundamental understanding of the effects of altered climate on lake ecosystems and enable managers to increase climate change resilience. This project will result in six major advances: 1) an established American-Australian community of water researchers, managers, industry officials, and government representatives working together to mitigate the effects of climate change on lakes and reservoirs; 2) lake forecasting systems generating real-time predictions of water quality and methane emissions to inform management; 3) water quality and methane forecasting models for each lake; 4) forecast visualizations and decision support tools; 5) open-access teaching modules; and 6) critical knowledge on the responses of freshwater ecosystems to climate change. This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative program that supports use-inspired research addressing global challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Track 2 design awards support U.S.-based researchers to bring together international teams to develop research questions and partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, synthesize data, and/or build multi-stakeholder networks to advance their use-inspired research at larger scale in the future.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.