Kickoff Meeting Summary

From September 12-14, 2007, the kickoff meeting for the NSF-funded project, “Water Cycle Dynamics in a Changing Environment: Achieving Hydrologic Science through Synthesis,” was held in Monticello, Ill. This meeting brought together in one location researchers from around the nation and the world who are involved in this project, including the principal investigators, group project members, and evaluation assessment personnel. A complete list of attendees can be found at this end of this report.

After Murugesu Sivapalan, the PI for this project introduced everyone to the overall goal of the effort, presentations were made to the group on the cyberinfrastructure efforts that are designed to increase collaboration among the project participants. The project also incorporates a component of self-assessment to examine how the project is achieving its stated goals as it moves forward, and the logistics of this effort were provided to the community. A separate synthesis activity is also ongoing, and is based at the University of New Hampshire, and a progress report was provided to the Illinois group. Otherwise, during the entire first day and morning of the second day, each of five potential synthesis activity groups made presentations on ideas each had on a particular research problem that could be examined, and how it could be brought together with projects by the other groups to achieve synthesis. Subsequent to these presentations, a plenary discussion was held for the entire community to brainstorm and work towards refining the project goals and the formation of the Synthesis Activity Groups. Each of these groups then met separately to refine their project goals and decide upon the suite of activities, logistics, and protocols to be utilized in the achievement of their group project.

At the end of the meeting, five separate research groups had been formed:

Project 1 - Hydromorphology: Human-Nature Interactions and Adaptations (led by Upmanu Lall)

Project 2 - Interactions between the hydrosphere and biosphere processes (led by Praveen Kumar)

Project 3 - Multi-scale Interactions of Landscape Processes within Intensively Managed Landscapes (led by Murugesu Sivapalan)

Project 4 - Evolution, structure, and function of hydrologic subsystems in hillslopes (led by Peter Troch)

Project 5 - Stochastic Transport and Emergent Scaling in Earth-Surface Processes (led by Rina Schumer and Efi Foufoula-Georgiou)

It was decided that the members of each group would interact utilizing the project cybercollaboratory and group workshops. This interaction will be occurring during the course of 2007-2008. It was agreed that an informal meeting and session for all participants would be held at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December.

Kickoff Meeting Participants

Larry Band (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Paul Brooks (University of Arizona)

Jon Chorover (University of Arizona)

Shane Csiki (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Francina Dominguez (University of Arizona)

Darren Drewry (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

David Gochis (National Center for Atmospheric Research)

Mark Green (University of New Hampshire)

Ciaran Harman (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Marwan Hassan (University of British Columbia)

Travis Huxman (University of Arizona)

Doug Jerolmack (University of Pennsylvania)

Praveen Kumar (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

David Kerschtel (CUASHI)

Axel Kleidon (Max Plank Institute, Jena, Germany)

Upmanu Lall (Columbia University)

Henry Lin (Pennsylvania State University)

Yong Liu (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Larry Murdoch (Clemson University)

Jim Myers (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Aaron Packman (Northwestern University)

Amilcare Porporato (Duke University)

Craig Rasmussen (University of Arizona)

Bruce Rhoads (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Ben Ruddell (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Patricia Saco (University of Newcastle, Australia)

Rina Schumer (Desert Research Institute)

Murugesu Sivapalan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Jennifer Tank (University of Notre Dame)

Peter Thornton (National Center for Atmospheric Research)

Fuqiang Tian (Tsinghua University, China)

Peter Troch (University of Arizona)

Enrique Vivoni (New Mexico Tech)

Charles Vörösmarty (University of New Hampshire)

Don Wuebbles (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)