Season 3/Episode 3: Ed Clark: Harmonizing hydrology to better predict water
Ed Clark
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Ed Clark, Director of NOAA’s National Water Center and the Deputy Director of the National Weather Service’s Office of Water Prediction, talks with John about how data science plays a role in water forecasting, how new tools and technologies can provide better services to all communities, and how the National Water Center might help prepare the nation for the implications of climate change on human health.
Show Notes
Watch an animation of the National Water Model Streamflow Analysis from the 2021-2022 water year
See the Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service Ed mentions in the episode.
View the Precipitation-Frequency Atlas of the United States, NOAA Atlas 14, and find more information on the update to NOAA Atlas 15.
Ed says he’s closely following the work of the Western States Water Council on their Water Data Exchange (WaDE).
Ed mentions the book, Beyond the 100th Meridian, by Wallace Stegner
Read about the Cooperative Institute for Research Operations and Hydrology (CIROH) Ed mentions. It is a partnership between NOAA and The University of Alabama dedicated to advancing water prediction.
Transcript
START (ED CLARK INTERVIEW)
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JOHN: Welcome to Audacious Water, the podcast about how to create a world of water abundance for everyone. I'm John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University.
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JOHN: On today's show, harmonizing hydrology to better predict water. My guest is Ed Clark, director of NOAA's National Water Center, and the deputy director of the National Weather Service's Office of Water Prediction. Ed is certainly a water enthusiast--he grew up kayaking in Utah and now integrates his passion for water into his work, creating the future of our nation's water forecasting capabilities. Coming up I talk with Ed about the National Water Center and the National Water Model, how new data science plays a role in water forecasting, and how that data science will help better inform people about their risks for floods.
JOHN: Ed, welcome to the show.
ED: Happy to be here, John.
JOHN: Let's jump right in. National Water Center--tell us what the National Water Center does and why Alabama.
ED: Well, let me start with how we got here. Back in 2007, 2008 NOAA received a directed appropriation to build a Center of Excellence for severe water and water in the southeast. Fast-forward to 2010, coincident with the appropriation, we had been working with the colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues from the Army Corps of Engineers on something that we call the "Integrated Water Resources Science and Service." This is a consortium of up to three agencies that actually grew in 2015 to include FEMA, (which) recognizes that these federal agencies have a unique partnership in forecasting, measuring, managing, and respond to water issues across the country.
JOHN: Tell me more about what it does, yeah. That's good background.
ED: So the Water Center is part of NOAA's National Weather Service. We're complemented at 13 river forecast centers and 122 weather forecast offices that have a responsibility for providing the official forecast as well as the Watch Warning Advisory Products that come out of the local weather forecast offices for their local communities. The Water Center augments those capabilities. It allows us to go deeper, to develop and embrace new technologies. For example, later this year we we're leasing for the first time real-time forecast flood-(inundation) maps for 10% of the country. We've been doing this for the last four or five years, and are now working with our river forecast centers and weather forecast offices whose - the staff are trained. It's just one of the many enabling technologies that we are developing here at the water center that we've deployed through the network of 13 RFCs and 122 weather forecast offices. We also had an operational component here of the National Water Center, our Water Predictions and Operations Division, and they act as a national clearinghouse for a national view of the nation's water resources from floods to droughts, and other challenges in between, a well as providing a reach-back capability for the local and regional offices, those weather forecast offices at river forecast centers.
JOHN: Got it. So let's dig in a little bit more. You said that at the National Water Center you have these capabilities to kind of dig deeper and to explore new tech. Let's explore each one of those one by one. What about the deeper piece? What can you do that we couldn't do without the National Water Center before?
ED: So there's three areas I want to highlight. The first is the National Water Model. When we began planning for the National Water Center it wasn't just what we could do with the existing technology, but it was the opportunity to showcase the water center and to treat capabilities that went beyond what the existing forecast and capabilities at the time were. For example, the River Forecast Centers produce forecasts at about 3600 locations. They're generally U.S. Geological gauges. Sometimes they're in flow points to (inaudible) reclamation facility or an Army Corps of Engineers dam. But it's about 3600 locations. If you connect those locations from upstream to downstream to determine if this is either at the coast or inland bodies of water, like the Great Salt Lake, that's about 110,000 miles of river. We've developed something called the "National Water Model." This is a comprehensive continental skill capability that forecasts over 3.4 million miles of streams around the country. And it's this capability that allows us to provide an extensive - an expansive view of the change and the way water falls, where it rains, where it precipitates, where the snowpack creates runoff where it moves through the system, what it sees as it goes from headwaters in the Rockies down through the Great Plains to the Mississippi and out to the coast, and where it ends up. Where water comes from and where it ends up along the coast has many implications for water quality issues, such as harmful algal blooms, hypoxic (zone) development. So the National Water Model is one of these capabilities that has really, really allowed us to go well beyond where we were with the 13 river forecast centers.
JOHN: Got it. So let me ask a further question on the National Water Model. I mean, I'm familiar with land surface models; we use a bunch of different ones. Tend to take an agnostic approach to that. And I know the trials and tribulations that come along with developing something at a continental scale like (CONUS). What have been the major hurdles in development of the National Water Model for use in National Weather Center work?
ED: So the current formulation, the National Water Model is based off of the (Works Hydro) Land Surface Model, and that's a homogenous view of storm-flow generation and snowmelt processes across the country. That homogeneity in the model will be corrected or fixed as we embrace something and develop what we call the "Next Gen National Water Model," the framework. This isn't a model, it's more of a framework that allows us to integrate multiple different models to use (the right) formulation for a model in the desert southwest that may be different from what we use in the Northeast or the upper great plains, and certainly would be different than what we would deploy for storm-flow or runoff generation processes in the Caribbean, or Hawaii, or even Alaska. And we could add other modules like variable snow models that may work better, such as Utah Energy Balance Model in the intermountain west, or glacial processes models that we need to account for in the Northwest, and even up into Alaska. And so that challenge of trying to represent in a single formulation the complexity of our nation's hydrology, is an opportunity to grow and expand. And I'll say this, that as we leverage these bipartisan infrastructure law resources to build the next-gen framework our hope is that it's not just a framework that's used by NOAA, but it's a framework that's used by other federal agencies and academia, and it allows us to integrate the best science, particularly from the academic sector, into a national tool that's used for forecasting, for prediction, for study, for analysis of the shared resource that is our nation's water.
JOHN: That's cool. I mean, what you're describing is kind of the holy grail of hydrology in a lot of ways. And one of the ways that I want to dig into a little bit more is kind of the difference between the physics that you need for hydrology and the data science that you need to implement it on a scale like you're talking about, and for answering questions immediately and of national need. Talk to me about the role of data science in that, because I think we have data-science listeners and I think that would be interesting to them.
ED: I will say the application of hydroinformatics has been something that I was not exposed to in my career, in my educational background. But working with some of the experts at universities like BYU, Utah State, our colleagues in the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, or CUAHSI, the backbone of what we're doing here at the Water Center is embracing the data sciences. I'll give you an example. The network that we chose when we began implementing the National Water Model in its current formulation is based on the U.S. Geological and EPA's co-funded, co-sponsored, co-developed National Hydrography Dataset. This networking system is effectively an addressing system or a roadway for your water droplet. Just like your GPS knows how to route your car from point A to point B across the highway, street, network of the country, the National Hydrography Network allows us to - the National Hydrography Dataset allows us to know which rivers flow to which streams, at which nexuses they connect, what stream gauges they pass, that that information can be registered, how they may connect wetlands. It's a massive dataset. It's not only complex but it's elegant. Some of the animations that we produce of previous years' hydrologic conditions they observed or the analysis cycle from the National Water Model, show the water pulsing through the nation. And it almost looks like a heartbeat or blood flowing through the capillary system in the human body. It really does underscore that this nation - that the waters, our water resources really are the lifeblood of our nation, both through the economy and the safety, navigation, recreation, all of those different areas. So that's one of the data science pieces.
JOHN: Yeah, that's excellent. I can't see that image. And I think I have seen some of them, but I often in writing for Forbes, describe the Mississippi as the "cardiovascular system of the United States," you know, it touches so many states and provinces in Canada, and really seeing the Mississippi and those water droplets pulse through it is truly impressive. And so shifting gears a little bit on the practical side, tell me what - like, if someone on the street who doesn't have a science background asks you, "What does this center do for me?" can you give me a couple of examples of things that the National Water Center has been involved in that you think would hit that drumbeat?
ED: So every year we release the Spring Flood Outline, and this is part of the nation's National Hydrologic Assessment. So that's a prediction that we produce with the 13 river forecast centers, and it looks at the probability of (receding) minor, moderate, or major flooding for the spring flood period. And we use that information to help guide decisions made by other agencies, such as how they preposition resources or plan for activities that could range from a year like 2019, where there was massive flooding across the Midwest, then (inaudible) and Mississippi River at flood stage at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, for over 140-some-odd days. So that's a practical application, (inaudible) a look forward (on) the seasonal basis. The other one that I think folks will begin to see in the coming months and years is our flood (inundation) map and capabilities. The National Water Center is on track to produce and release for the first time real-time flood (inundation) maps that predict - that show and illustrate the impacts of rainfall runoffs on flooding in somebody's neighborhood. The National Hydrography Dataset which we just discussed, they (create the runs) through my backyard here in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is in that network. And as we release the flood (inundation) information when those creeks are up and out of their banks when there's flooding, these flood (inundation) maps will show in a very practical, very easy way for folks to interpret, where the floodwaters are, and more importantly where they aren't. So in a couple years' timeframe, just like we see - we're used to looking at weather move through communities on National Weather Service radar - weather radar systems, we see the front approaching--and sometimes there is embedded severe storm cells or even tornados--we'll be able to show in real time, and out through five days, the areas that are either at risk for flooding currently or projected to have floodwaters on a map that's easy to interpret, consumable, and could be packaged up into an application on a smartphone or in their car.
JOHN: That's awesome. So who do you think your primary clients are? I'm talking like a businessperson now. But, you know, that was a question about a specific client, but in general who are you serving data to?
ED: So we have a very strong relationship with the emergency management community. In fact, the work that we've been doing leading up to this public release of these flood (inundation) maps has really benefitted our relationship with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. FEMA has come to us a number of times in these largescale events, ranging from Hurricane Florence to the very tragic flooding in Kentucky that occurred just last spring - or last summer, with requests for information on how they can maneuver and help respond and mitigate the flood impacts. Where do they need to send first responders, (search-water) rescue folks, deploy largescale teams? And then in the event of these tragic catastrophic floods, where they can send folks to go out and look and review the storm damage so that they can quickly provide assistance to those communities. That extends to the local and regional emergency managers. In fact our flood (inundation) mapping capability was first really highlighted in 2017 during Hurricane Harvey when the Texas Department of Emergency Management made the request of the National Weather Service director at the time to help provide some of these early versions of flood (inundation) mapping to help the (inaudible) guide the response for truly an unprecedented event in the Houston metro area.
JOHN: So FEMA's a big client, and that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot and I wanted to ask you about that we've been talking about is events. You know, this event in your backyard... But last year we had record lows in the Mississippi, and it was a year when we had also record highs--the floods in Kentucky like you talked about, the floods in Yellowstone, pieces of the Mississippi River in different places. What kind of products do you guys have that could help communicate I think to the public the second moment of climate change and how that's changing over time? So the variation?
ED: So there's a couple different pieces. One, in terms of the event scale analysis, or event scale detection, we have developed and deployed something called the "Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service." This is a technology that characterizes uncertainty and flows for the next hour or six hours, ten days, thirty days out to about a full water-supply year. Characterizing that uncertainty, particularly in the face of climate change, certainly is an interest and need for a number of decision-makers on the high end of things, as we talked about with the floods, but also on the low end. Looking for the exudence of (low-throw) or the reaching of low-flow thresholds is of critical importance. One of the other products that we work with here and we develop that is more at that, you know, assessment of climate, is NOAA's Precipitation Frequency Atlases. The current version is called NOAA Atlas 14 and it's used by engineers to design all manners of infrastructure. It's the annual recurrence interval, or the 1% chance storm, or .02% rainfall event that you can expect at a point. We know, as you just mentioned, that climate change, shifting - warming climate, the atmosphere holds more moisture which would lead to higher and more intense rainfall events. We're seeing that. So we produced NOAA Atlas 14. And fortunately under the leveraging investments made by congress in the bipartisan infrastructure law we'll be able to update Atlas 14, something we will call "Atlas 15," to not only provide a seamless continental actually (O-CONUS)- and (CONUS)-scale update to these precipitation frequencies that's based on observations. So it will include the last 20-some-odd-plus years of data that has not been included in Atlas 14. It will be seamless. And then Atlas 15 will also have a second volume, and this volume 2 will take into account the climate projection models and apply adjustment factors to the new information in Atlas 15 volume 1 to create Atlas 15 volume 2, that will have adjustment factors for various periods going forward in time as our climate changes, as precipitation patterns change--increase in some locations, potentially decrease in others.
JOHN: Those are - sound like fabulous products. I want to ask you - this might seem like a silly question but I want to ask it anyway. And I want to hear your reaction to how you would approach the answer. So, you know, I got asked last year a lot, "Is the Mississippi going to become the Colorado?" when it was drought time in the Mississippi. And so the question is, if I ask you, "Is there going to be a drought again this year, how do you answer that question?
ED: Hmm. That is a tricky question to ask and to answer. If you were asking me, "Is there going to be a drought again ever," the answer is yes. That so much we know. There's one part hydrology to this question, there's another part population patterns, land use, land cover, and one part climate change. Certainly as we see water being used in place, whether it be for more municipal use that may or may not be returned back into the waterways, we just have more people using our critical water resources, and that is the waters of the Mississippi. I also think that the shift in patterns could certainly play a role in how much rainfall takes place over the Ohio Basin, which is really what the driver was from last year's drought. I also would challenge my colleagues across the country to ensure that we have better precursor indicators. Low-flow, a drought in a channel, may or may not lead to drought in this surrounding outside of the channel applications.
JOHN: That's a critical point right there, yeah.
ED: So this low-flow threshold, which is something I think we in the Weather Service are (partnershipped) with our colleagues in local communities, not just emergency managers but water managers. Perhaps, you know, the power generation folks, all manner of electrical generation, usually, with the exception of solar and wind, requires some form of water to turn it into steam, to drive our turbines. And so when plants can no longer take water out of the channel... We may not be in an agricultural drought, but are we getting close to something where our ability to manage, to harness the power of that resource, in this case water in the channel, becomes increasingly difficult because it exceeds some element of our engineering design criteria? I think that looking at low-flows combined with this new predictive capability, our Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service, to better characterize the uncertainty both as the hydrographs climb, and as they drop off, that's certainly - I think could help answer that question. There's a saying that "floods will destroy a city but droughts destroy civilizations." I think that risk is becoming more and more apparent as we move further and further into the 21st Century.
JOHN: Yeah, it's almost like in some ways the 100th meridian doesn't exist anymore, and there is a lot different hydroclimate north and south along the 100th meridian that makes that happen. So we talked about a couple of things - couple of questions here, but we kind of touched on them briefly, but I want to dig into one of them. Agencies--you have a lot of collaboration among agencies. And I remember at the White House Water Summit in 2016 I think when this Center was announced--or maybe it was the National Water Model that was announced in the 2016 White House Water Summit as part of this--but I remember that when it was announced there was a lot of buzz about centralizing water data in the United States in a new agency. It sounds like you guys kind of do that. Talk to me about federation of water-data resources in the United States and how you guys contribute to that.
ED: That is a great question, and I think it is a recognition not so much that there's been a centralized, brand-new infrastructure built, but we're speaking a common language. We talked about the nation's hydro-fabric, the connectivity network that's based on the National Hydrography Dataset that the USGS and EPA have developed. We continue to leverage that in our work, and as we look at the next-gen resources modeling framework there's a movement led by our colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey, Dave Blodgett and Roland Viger, that - they call it the "High Features Dataset." And it truly is a data standard that allows us to describe in a very common, integratable fashion how the nation's rivers, waterways, streams, lakes connect, and characterize them in such a way that when NOAA builds a dataset and adds to it, or USGS does, or the EPA does for management of wetlands, or the Corps does to manage some of their projects, all that information - the richness and the robustness of that information can be brought back into that network. The other aspect of this that I'm extremely interested in and following closely is the work done by the Western States Governors' Association and the Western States Water Council, and their (weighed) dataset. This is an integration of multiple water datasets that really look at consumptive use and water rights, well data. And so this ability to speak holistically and to integrate datasets--not necessarily centrally collect and manage, but integrate them, have databases speaking to each other--I think is at the center of this new federation of data - of water data, as you mentioned. And the other aspect of this, John, that I would be remiss if I didn't point out, we're training a generation of hydrologists to be data scientists through some of the work that's being done at the university level. This notion of teaching hydroinformatics to undergraduates and graduates as part of their curriculum, not wait until they get out into the field, whether in government or private sector, to learn about these types of ways of organizing thinking and leveraging data is truly, truly remarkable and necessary to that integration network of things or "network of networks," so to speak.
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JOHN: Coming up, I talk with Ed about creating what he calls "water intelligence"--how new tools and technologies can provide better services to all communities, including those that are under-resourced, and how the National Water Center might help prepare the nation for the implications of climate change on human health.
JOHN: Well, you touched on a lot of great issues there that speak to different roles that I play in the water community and I'm interested in. I think the very first one is data vs. language. And I think, you know, if you have a dictionary in a foreign language you can't speak it. And that's kind of maybe a similar analogy to, you know, a datacenter vs. a common language that integrates data across different cultures and different agencies at the state, the federal level, and the private sector. So I appreciate that. And I think the second point that really resonates with me is this training piece. Obviously I'm at a university and that's what I do for a living. But it's, you know, something I've been saying for five or ten years to my students--"If you don't take a couple classes in AI you're going to be behind." You know, these are PhD students, and it doesn't matter what degree they're taking--if it's ecology, hydrology, it doesn't matter--that's going to be part of... And not just AI, but data science in general is going to be part of what we do in every discipline moving forward. And I think starting with it makes sense, like I think you were saying. Or maybe I'm taking that a step further.
ED: No - no, you've hit it exactly on the head. And not to be too personal but I have my own regrets that I didn't take data-science classes, or wasn't able to take data-science classes 20, 25 years ago. The other thing that you said, John, that really resonates with me is that it's not just data, it's the application of these new technologies and tools. You could have a lot of data, but what we're about, what - in academia, here in the government, what we do - we strive for is to turn data into intelligence. And that means that not only do we have a lot of data, but we have ways to harvest the data and make it meaningful. For example, the short-rang version of the National (Art Mall), which is updated every hour and provides a forecast at 2.7 million locations, 3.4 million miles of rivers out through 18 hours, produces about a terabyte of data a day. And there's no human being that can make sense of a terabyte of information--we have to employ hydroinformatics and data science. We also need to take that data science, that data that returns to us in the form of information, and have enough wherewithal, the understanding of the social, behavioral, and economic sciences that drive the decisions that are being made around water, whether it be public safety, navigation, water-resources management, to help our stakeholders go from being - having data access to having water intelligence. And that's really been one of the challenges and also one of the hopes for the National Water Center is that we help create water intelligence for the country, that we have the time, the resources to sit down with stakeholders and understand what their challenges are, what their questions are, so that we can better work with our partners, whether it be the private sector or the academic sector, to study, explore, develop new techniques and concepts, to holistically--not just for the Water Center, not just from NOAA--but answer these water challenges in the 21st Century.
JOHN: Boy, I'm thinking about a television commercial for a startup in - maybe in the water space, maybe in the climate and data space, and their tagline is, "We take data and turn it into intelligence" or "water intelligence." I love that. I used to say "data to information," but "intelligence" makes sense because it's the interaction between humans and robots, if you will, the computer world that translates that into something useful for people.
ED: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And, you know, perhaps maybe in a future career we may be partners in that startup.
JOHN: Yeah, that sounds good.
ED: The other topic, John, if it's okay...
JOHN: Please.
ED: ...that is important to touch on is what does the Water Center, what does tools like the Water Model, what does that do to better address some of the dichotomies in how different communities are served by the government, by water-intelligence providers? One of the things we've hit upon is the difference between the information and guidance that comes out of the National Water Model and the official forecasts that are produced by the river forecast centers at those 3600 USGS gauges across the country? Well, those gauges are the gold standard. They are - only about one-third of those are fully-appropriated by Congress. The other two-thirds require some manner of community partnership, whether that be state, other federal agency, tribal, or local government. And as you can imagine, if the community is under-resourced, underserved, they may not have those resources to be able to partners with the USGS (on a gauge). One of the things we can do in collaboration with the USGS is - and with tools like the National Water Model, and like the next-generation operational - or Next-Generation Water Observing System, or NGWOS the USGS is doing, is looking at ways to explore the integration of these observations onto networks like the hydrofabric that provide better services to communities that may or may not have an actual USGS gauge or a gauging station in the community. I try to explain this very esoteric concept by asking folks who do this (inaudible), imagine if the National Weather Service only provided a forecast at a commercially-served airport. And so if you're sitting in--let's take my adopted home state of Utah--if I'm sitting in Moab, Utah the forecast may be available to either Grand Junction, Colorado or Salt Lake City, neither of which may or may not be representative of the weather that I will be experiencing, particularly not at the fine, you know, four-kilometer scale that I'm experiencing. So if we're only providing water information, water forecast at these gauge locations we ignore - or we don't have the opportunity to help serve communities that simply don't have the infrastructural backbone to support the traditional method of forecasting. So I think there's this notion of - there's this intersection of these hydrologic - or informational sciences with networks, with observations, with models, that allow us to even go beyond and stitch together what we know with better ways to provide services for those that are potentially underserved.
JOHN: Boy, and that's very - that area that you described is very close to my former home in Arizona. And I know that that part of southern Utah and northern Arizona on the north side of the Colorado River is so hard to explore, and also so Native. There are so many reservations there. There aren't cell towers in places. They're, you know, getting data that's exact to your tourist outing up a slot canyon, or to your farm on a reservation, is probably a tricky thing. And it sounds like this data product has some - or set of data products that you've been describing, many of them have some application in that space, and that's great.
ED: Yeah, I think we have a responsibility as government agencies to do everything we can to integrate, you know, the investments that are made at multiple agencies. But to think that, sure, that the sum is greater than the addition of the part, or the whole is greater than the sum of the parts...
JOHN: So shifting gears a little bit, this is a topic that I think about a lot, and I'll give you some context for it. When I was at ASU I led an effort called "Future H2O," which was an academic enterprise dedicated to multidisciplinary science in the water space. And one of the things that I grapple with a lot is how much work do I do locally, and how much work do I do at a bigger scale, nationally or internationally. And, you know, it seemed like the answer from ASU's president was yes. And I get that, because universities want to be good to their - especially state universities to the students that they serve, but also want to have a footprint that's larger than that. Talk to me about that footprint and how at the University of Alabama the National Water Center balances that "teeter-totter," shall I say, between local and larger-scale endeavors.
ED: Yeah, so, I mean, if I had my druthers I would be able to, with my team and I... Because we're naturally curious--we love water, we love rivers. Many of us got into this business because of our experiences in outdoors. (Inaudible) you mentioned beyond the 100th meridian. Wallace Stegner's book on Powell's exploration of the Colorado is sitting on my bookshelf behind me. The question of local vs. national efforts, I mean, it always comes down to the impacts of our water challenges are profoundly local, but they have national implications in terms of national security. With our partnership at the University of Alabama there's something called the "Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology," which we just awarded last year. We, the University of Alabama and the Alabama Water Institute, have taken a network approach--again, to come back to this notion of networks in networks. CIROH--they've got to phoneticize every acronym in the federal government--but CIROH--no relationship to that small town on the river in Egypt--CIROH is a 28-member consortium of both degree-granting institutions, but also private-sector and NGOs, and non-governmental organizations. And so it's the attempt by the University of Alabama to have a footprint that is much larger - it really is at the national scale. We have - CIROH has member institutions with - from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, to Vermont, to Alabama, to the coast of Carolina, Arizona's included, as is New Mexico, Utah, Utah State, BYU. And I'm sure I’m leaving off many, many more. But that's the goal here is to leverage the expertise of multiple universities and institutions, to understand, to have a collection of knowledge, collection of expert, to tackle, to integrate, and to discuss what a really very local - local problems, but have that national dialogue, have that national (skill) conversation. And the reason I think for doing a lot of this is two-fold. One, you know, as you well know, hydrology is spread across I think it's 135 different universities that comprise the Consortium of the University for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, or CUAHSI. They're in little pockets at departments here and there. The other aspect of this--so that's the unifying factor--the other aspect of this is what one PI may study at a university in, say, Vermont certainly may have implications for another community, another researcher, or a graduate student, or a post-doc at a university in, say, the central valley of California. By having that national dialogue about local issues it creates the opportunity for those folks to become (forced) multipliers of each other.
JOHN: That's great. That's an interesting model. I mean, I'm grappling with the same set of challenges at Tulane, because you know the challenges we have in Louisiana; you guys are close. And you know the Mississippi River is part of that. The Mississippi River is a large part of your prediction engine. But making that more than the sample size of one has been something that's been a goal of mine my entire career. And so I like the notion of creating a local institution that thinks bigger rather than trying to link local and international or national, which is very hard I think.
ED: It is. And I - you know, we all struggle with this, it's how do we take the nuances of a very local challenge and make it of interest to those that aren't impacted necessarily by it? We all sit back - I don't want to say "sit back" - but we watch sometimes in horror, sometimes in awe, of the ways folks in Louisiana respond to this massively complicated historical relationship with the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast. And yet I can't help but think to myself and ask others who may not have those challenges today, "how long"--it's not "if"--"how long until those issues become something that we deal with? How log until some of those issues take place along the Alabama coast? How long until (inaudible) sea-level rise create issues along the Eastern Seaboard of the Atlantic Coast that look a lot like what Louisiana has been battling for the last 50, 100 years?"
JOHN: Good answer, and good follow-up on that. I like those. A lot to think about there. This - I’m going to go off-script a little bit here and just ask a question about something that we've talked about before, and it's the intersection between climate change and health. And in talking to you about this you kind of pointed to activation of wetlands and floodplains. Talk to me about kind of how you would see a role for the National Water Center in helping the U.S. prepare for health-related impacts of climate change.
ED: So I'd love to take credit for this, but this is where it always pays to surround yourself by experts and by folks that are much smarter than you. And a lot of folks are much smarter than I am. And I'll give credit to this to my colleague and friend (Duane Young) from the EPA, who really planted a seed in my mind a couple years ago. We have this National Hydrography Network. We have a National Water Model that predicts water on that network. We have a flood (inundation) mapping capability that identifies when the water in that network has potentially gone up and over out of its banks, activating (swellance). And we have a historical analysis that goes back 40 years based on the work that we do. Every time we upgrade the National Water Model we do this retrospective run. We also have climate-scale models that can be applied to this. But even just having an understanding from a climatological - from a historical standpoint, developing a climatology around the activation of wetlands allows us to characterize - to take a snapshot, put a placemark, a "mark in the sand" if you will, where we are today vs. where the frequency occurs in the future. Does it increase or does it decrease? I think the answer is it probably depends on where you are. But that interaction with wetlands I think is certainly now part of a system - a holistic, comprehensive, systematic approach that could allow us to begin to answer questions where there are implied relationships between the movement of water--where it comes, where it goes, how it moves with the land surface, where (inaudible), and health issues. And we're not there yet. And I think what needs - but we have some of the building blocks that we could use to assemble it, and a system where there's water knowledge, water intelligence that can be integrated with other process models, whether it be vectors like insects or...
JOHN: ...allergens from different kinds of vegetation, you could go on and on, yeah.
ED: Exactly - exactly. You know, one of the joys of moving to the South, particularly from the West but even the Northeast, is this notion of a pollen season where everything is covered in yellow dust. Sometimes it's really, really bad, and sometimes it's not as terrible. And I have to believe that there is - in addition to all the historical context with selective tree-planting it is really (inaudible) - it all comes down to water in the end.
JOHN: Yep. Hey man, couple more questions here. This is super interesting and I want to kind of keep it going for a little bit longer. I'm thinking about diversity, inclusion, and equity at this point, and more from the standpoint of technology penetration into rural communities that don't have the resources to have flood protection, flood prediction, that don't have the resources to have a Congresswoman who's lobbying for them for their backyard because they're small. And there are lots of small places like that. Are the products that you guys develop, are they accessible by a small community in a rural agricultural area of 10,000 people? Can they use that to plan?
ED: I think we haven't done a good enough job in this space. The data, the ones and the zeros that comprise the digital product are there. But it's my understanding, and I'm not an expert in these fields, but what I'm trying to understand, what my team and I are trying to understand is how do these communities make decisions? How do they access information? There's likely--and I don't want to under- discredit the ability for folks in these communities who are exceedingly intelligent to have access to technology, but it's probably not as ubiquitous as it would be in a major urban area. Computers may not be as prevalent, the training programs in high schools may not be there. So I don't know that we've done a good enough job in making these - in working with regional and local stakeholders to make that information available. We need to. And we have direction from Congress through Section 14 of the Floods Act to actually develop a hydrologic fellowship program to train a set of - train an education pathway that it does work more closely with historically-underserved colleges and universities to have that training. But even before we get there--because that will take years and years to build--before we get there how do we make a profoundly digital product successful to somebody in a local community? There's two ways we could go about it. One is this notion of (extension of agents) has to be holistic. And so maybe just folks that are doing cultural extensions also have the same tools in their toolchest to talk about floodplain literacy. These are conversations that we're just beginning to have. But this notion of creating conversations around this space so that it's not just, you know, a once-in-a-generation(al) flood that brings these issues to the forefront of community decisionmakers and planners, brings into their minds that it's something that they think about on a more routine basis. And that could be from the floodplain side of things; it could also be from the drought side of things. I believe that people fundamentally have a connection to their local regional water. Living here in Alabama, (Commercial) River, I have a new appreciation for the navigation industry and just how much and how frequently our rivers really continue to this day to service the major arteries for transportation of goods and services. It's really - you growing up in the West, not really seeing any commercial traffic, particularly in the Southwest, away from the Snake and the Columbia Rivers, not seeing any commercial traffic, it is really, really fascinating for me to see that here today. So there's that aspect. There's this notion of what are the relationships that people have with water in their communities, and how can we better inform that, understand, listen to them, hear them, and then look for opportunities to think outside of the box, to make sure that information is not just data that's accessible through a website, but maybe is a set of maps that are printed and updated in a local library? Or opportunities to speak with community leaders? And maybe those aren't elected officials; maybe they're religious leaders. Maybe they're folks at a point of intersection, you know, I think, like, a farm co-op--how can we get that information to the right formats in and around the right contextualization of the question so that these communities are better served by these investments at the national scale?
JOHN: That's super interesting. It's ambitious to pursue that. And one thing that I'll say just kind of in summary is, I mean, you guys have the data infrastructure that speaks to the built and natural infrastructure systems that guide water from where it falls down to the ocean. But what's missing is the social infrastructure to make that happen at the rural level. Is that a pretty accurate summary?
ED: I think so, yeah. I think we need to look at applying some of the things that we've been very good at was the networks of information on the physical and natural side, and include as layers better ways to understand what the social networks are, the social infrastructure. And I don't mean social media but I mean the actual social networks, the communities of folks who get together for coffee at a crossroads, who can convey, you know, different types of information that they may be exposed to so that it harnesses their network of contacts, and friends, and family members to begin to provide better intelligence to answer these questions. We're all at risk for water challenges, particularly as we get into a warming and a changing climate. These challenges are only going to get greater. And they touch all of us - they impact all of us.
JOHN: Amen to that as well. A closing question, so - and as a preface I grew up in Colorado, fished in New Mexico, skied in Utah, trained in California, and partied in Las Vegas, so I've been all over the West, all over the Colorado Basin. I know the differences between the states and how they view water. I know, you know, what it means to be from each of those states. Being sort of self-proclaimed Utah - from Utah, tell me what you miss the most and least about the West. It could be about water or just something personal.
ED: Just really the network of friends that I grew up with on the rivers in and around Utah, Colorado, Idaho. Those are - river people are - as you may know, river people are friends for life. What I don't miss, you know, during the pandemic I was traveling back and forth to Utah to see a family member. And there was one period, I think it was June of 2021 when I flew into Salt Lake, and Salt Lake had evaporated so much from where it was. And I was living in Salt Lake--my father and I used to enjoy going out to the Great Salt Lake together, and large portions of it were gone. And it was June, and it was 107 degrees. That was shocking and alarming. But what it made me recognize is the fragility of water as it implies in that situation to water availability, water supply, but also the fragility of all of us as a nation to water challenges that impact us. You know, it's a stark contrast to go from that June of 2021 to Utah's highest snowpack on record in 2023. I certainly missed that. I'm not going to lie, I have a lot of jealousy there. But - so it's not something that I missed, but it's something that the West is a canary in the coal mine. Our fragility around water and water resources is just that we are extremely fragile. And I hope through, you know, the first directory of something that we call the "National Water Center," not the Alabama Flood Forecast Center or NOAA's flood agency, but the National Water Center, that we attack, that we begin to provide better services that address the range of threats to our nation's security or economy, floods, droughts, everything in between, and that we provide the intelligence that decisionmakers need, that we create a literate culture, society around water-related issues--too much, too little--again, that allows us to be - to take advantage of that intelligence when we can provide it.
JOHN: You and me are on the same page on that as well. That's certainly the way that I'm hoping to build ByWater. And I want to take a minute here just to thank you for being on the show. It's been a great conversation, and I hope we cross paths very soon and start talking about ways to collaborate.
ED: Absolutely, John, this has been a really fun dialogue for me. And this has - I think you asked me earlier what can we do? How can we move the needle on this? Conversations like we just had today are the beginning. It certainly can't be the end. So I really appreciate your interest.
JOHN: All right, thank you.
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JOHN: That's it for this episode of Audacious Water. If you like the show please rate or review us and tell your colleagues and friends. For more information about Audacious Water visit our website at AudaciousWater.org/podcast. Until next time I'm John Sabo.
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END (ED CLARK INTERVIEW)