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Background on Hydrologic Observatories

This Web site and the associated prospectus for the Great Salt Lake Basin as a Hydrologic Observatory have been developed in response to a solicitation of prospectuses by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUASHI, see www.cuashi.org). CUASHSI is promoting the establishment of hydrologic observatories (HOs), which are conceived to be instrumented river basins with areas of approximately 10,000 km² or larger. HOs are intended to revolutionize hydrologic science by providing coherent, integrated, multi-scale data on physical, chemical, and biological phenomena that will address major environmental challenges and long-standing hydrologic science questions. The larger scale of these field facilities will revolutionize Hydrologic Science through the direct study of intrinsically large-scale phenomena such a exchange of groundwater and surface water at the river-basin scale and through facilitating the testing of transferability of concepts developed from small-scale studies by providing a broader range of well-characterized locations.

According to CUAHSI, HOs are meant to be a community resource. The core data associated with an HO will be available to all through a common interface, and there will be equal access to the site, including support for remote investigators. HOs must be sufficiently large to facilitate the exploration of all interfaces, including the land surface atmosphere interface. Each HO will be part of a national network with a goal to provide comparable data across the observatories so that hypotheses can be tested across a variety of hydrologic settings.

Hypotheses posed in each of the HOs should be interdisciplinary, innovative, and address the following five science topics:

1. Linking Hydrologic and Biogeochemical Cycles
2. Hydrologic Extremes
3. Sustainability of Water Resources
4. Transport of Chemical and Biological Contaminants
5. Hydrologic Influence on Ecosystem Functions

In addition, the cross cutting themes of scaling, forcing, feedback, and coupling, and predictions and limits to predictions should be addressed. Hydrologic characterization in an HO will be focused on three fundamental properties. Stores include surface, subsurface and atmosphere.

1. Fluxes between "stores"
2. Residence time within "stores"
3. Flowpaths among "stores"

One foundation of CUAHSI is that it is an open community based effort that is having a democratizing effect on hydrologic science, enabling participation and ownership in the program and science agenda by the 90 plus member universities, rather than domination in a field by a few top schools. The Great Salt Lake Basin Hydrologic Observatory development team is committed to this concept of openess and intends to develop an observatory with an aggressively open and rapid data access policy, so that this observatory is truly a community resource.

Useful Links

CUAHSI Website
Hydrologic Observatory Implementation Information
Hydrologic Observatory National Worshop August 24-25, 2004, at Utah State University