Fundamental Problem:

How Do Humans and Climate Impact the Sustainability of Water Resources in Large River Basins? Addressing this problem will require scientists to assess climate and terrestrial feedbacks across multiple scales and physiographical and ecological conditions in order to better define the roles that terrain, ecology, and geology play in partitioning water, energy, and nutrients across the complex environmental systems that make up the river basin.

Advancing River Basin Hydrologic Sciences: As disciplinary scientists, we will need to reexamine our individual hypotheses to embrace phenomena and processes spanning multiple scales of time, space and process, within and across the river basin.

Our goal is to improve the scientific basis for forecasting and prediction of water resources such that society can make better choices concerning the impacts of climate and anthropogenic change on local, regional and global water problems. As such, terrestrial hydrologic science will require a paradigmatic shift which embraces traditional disciplines but focuses on cross-disciplinary scientific inquiry.

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Our approach is to design and implement an integrated observing system for water, energy and biogeochemical cycles across the river basin. Advances in river basin science cannot move forward without a more integrated observing system, where the atmosphere, vegetation, geochemical and hydrologic processes are all observed coherently from headwaters to estuary. Following the guidelines laid out in the Neuse River Prototype, the proposed structure of the proposed observatory has two basic elements:

1) The SRB hydrologic Observing System is formed as a network of testbeds covering the major physiographic regions of the SRB and designed to make nested observations of water, energy and mass.
2) Cross-cutting science themes will link and synthesize observations across the watershed network and allow a more holistic hydrologic understanding and predictive capability at all scales relevant to the river basin.

Organizing in Support of Science: Given that the SRB Observatory is to be an NSF-funded infrastructure proposal, it is crucial that we inform, coordinate, and cooperate with a broad spectrum of scientists about what we are doing to advance river-basin science, and what it will mean to their research. It is clear, that unless scientists use SRBHOS (i.e. that they collectively write NSF investigator research proposals which will use the facility) we will not be able to justify the investment that NSF is making ($10M over 5 years and $3M/yr operating budget).

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Why an Observatory?
The multiple connections of streams, hillslopes and aquifers within a single drainage basin, and their complex mass and energy exchanges across the stream-groundwater and soil-moisture-groundwater interfaces are poorly understood. These complex exchanges of mass and energy are essential to evaluating the state of water resources, hydrochemical responses, ecological conditions, timing and magnitude of floods, droughts, landuse and climate change.

The fundamental problem is that the existing climate-surface water-groundwater observation network is insufficient to support hydrologic science or the management of the national water resources. Understanding the hydrologic cycle of a large river basin is critical to solving local to regional scale problems related to climate change, biogeochemical cycling, ecosystem and landuse dynamics, and sustainable water management.

A scientifically designed observing system will address linkages and feedbacks between the global-to-regional-to local hydrologic cycle, identify the rates of mass and energy transport, while closing the data and knowledge gaps in the predictive skill of the terrestrial hydrologic cycle. The observatory will concentrate scientific expertise and infrastructure sufficient to test fundamental scientific hypotheses on process and prediction at each scale of interest.

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