The Problem
As the world population grows, so do concerns that water availability and water quality will continue to diminish. Changes in land use, climate change, and extreme weather exacerbate these concerns, which threaten not only our freshwater supply, but also systems that rely on watershed exports such as hydropower and agriculture.
- Watersheds funnel rain and snowmelt to river basins where they are used by municipalities, agriculture, and energy producers.
- We rely on river systems and watersheds to filter and transform biogeochemically excess nutrients or other toxic elements
- But watershed and river basin function may be impacted by: Population growth and land use change; Increase in contaminant and nutrient inputs; Changing precipitation and temperature
The Opportunity
With leadership class computers, big data, and machine learning combined in learning-assisted physics-based simulation tools, we have an opportunity to fundamentally change how watershed function is understood and predicted.
What We Will Do
Explore strategies for learning-assisted physics-based simulations, including:
- Develop model inputs from sparse, coarse, and indirectly related information
- Hybridize process-resolving simulations and machine learning (ML)
- Enable multiscale approaches
- Facilitate inverse modeling and UQ
Where We Will Do It
- Upper Colorado Water Resources Region (UCWRR)
- Delaware River Basin (DRB)
The Team
The ExaSheds team consists of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, U.S. Geological Survey, University of Texas, Austin.
Collaborations
- Key collaboration with the Next Generation Water Observing System (NGWOS) led by the USGS on data and conceptual models for both the DRB and UCWRR.
- Close partnership with the Berkeley Lab Watershed Function SFA in the East River, Colorado Watershed as a source of data and as a user of software products.
- Close collaboration with ESS-Dive
- Collaboration with the SAIL project centered on the Gunnison River Basin for validation of precipitation downscaling.
- Leveraging and collaboration with IDEAS-Watershed project for development and use of interoperable watershed software.
- Participation in Interagency effort for Integrated Hydro-Terrestrial Modeling (IHTM) and Cyber-Infrastructure Working Group.
- CD-MII project at PNNL.
For more information, visit the ExaShed Website.
This research is supported by the Data Management Program of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division.
The award to Berkeley Lab is under contract Award Number DE-AC02-05CH11231.