Within each of the four scientific and societal goals, this chapter identifies key scientific quantifiable objectives that, when addressed, will advance our scientific understanding toward the scientific and societal goals. Scientific advances toward these four goals will support the development of societal mitigation for risks to the hydrologic cycle (e.g., contamination of drinking water supplies) or risks derived from the hydrologic cycle (e.g., floods and droughts). The chapter identifies four scientific and societal goals associated with the hydrologic cycle: (1) coupling the water and energy cycles (2) prediction of changes (3) availability of freshwater and coupling with biogeochemical cycles (4) hazards, extremes, and sea-level rise. SOURCE: Courtesy of Jerald Schnoor.įuture planned missions like Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) will measure surface water elevations in lakes, reservoirs, and large rivers, and NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) will enable detection of surface disturbance by identifying subtle changes in surface elevation.Īs a part of the Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications from Space, the Panel on Global Hydrological Cycles and Water Resources (Hydrology, or “H”) was tasked with identifying the high-level integrative questions in understanding the movement, distribution, and availability of water and how these are changing over time, and proposing the remote sensing measurements that will enhance and continue developments needed to address these questions and critical associated applications. Together, the Landsat 8 Operational Line Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), combined with the European Sentinel-2 satellites and the future launch of Landsat 9, will image Earth’s land area at 15-30 m spatial resolution every 3 days.įIGURE 6.1 Earth’s freshwater landscape, including stores, transformations, and fluxes, from high mountain seasonal snow and glaciers, through ecosystems that may be managed, into our engineered agricultural, industrial, and urban landscapes.
#HENSLEY ET AL. HYDROLOGICAL PROCESSES 2018 SERIES#
Visual, infrared, and lightning imagery from Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), especially GOES-16 and satellites in the GOES series through 2036, provide monitoring capabilities to improve nowcasting and warning for extreme storms and associated responses to hazards. Missions such as the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP), and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)-along with sensors of the Earth Observing System (EOS)-including the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometers (AMSR-E and AMSR2), and lidar altimetry (Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite, ICESat)-have provided important measurements of shortwave and longwave radiation, snow and glacier extent and change, soil moisture, atmospheric water vapor, clouds, precipitation, terrestrial vegetation and oceanic chlorophyll, and water storage in the subsurface, among many others. Remotely sensed data play a key role in advancing our insight about Earth’s water resources. Therefore, understanding the hydrologic cycle and monitoring and predicting its vagaries are of critical importance to our societies. On this foundation, humans add engineered and social systems to control, manage, use, and alter our water environment for a variety of uses and through a variety of organizational and individual decisions ( Figure 6.1). Water is the most widely used resource on Earth, its mass nearly 300 times that of the atmosphere. Chemical, biological, and physical processes alter and are altered by water and its constituents. Water-the medium for life-shapes Earth’s surface and controls where and how we live.
Global Hydrological Cycles and Water Resources INPUT SUMMARY
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