Future Water

Understanding, Predicting, and Managing the Water Cycle of the Future

The Future Water Grand Challenge takes as its goal to develop transformational capabilities to quantify, predict, and improve water availability and quality at scale in response to a range of gradual and abrupt perturbations and complex constraints. Through our foundational projects, we are developing scalable approaches to simulate hydroclimate perturbations and their influences on watershed dynamics, novel techniques for storing water ‘at scale’ in the subsurface, and new approaches for the treatment of unconventional water sources for proposed reuse. The grand challenge is guided by four research objectives: 1) Predict how future hydroclimate forcings and complex environmental interactions within watersheds contribute to cumulative downgradient discharges of water, nutrients and contaminants. 2) Develop a water science knowledge-base that offers new analytical tools for decision-making. 3) Advance the scientific underpinning of new water management and treatment techniques. 4) Demonstrate the ability to scale developed approaches for application in natural and intensively managed water systems. Over the past three years these four questions have guided EESA’s efforts in developing new staff and new partnerships, launching and shaping new and existing projects, and targeting investments of LDRD resources.

Recent science & program advances

Chosen to lead a $100M DOE water-energy Hub to secure the Nation’s energy-water future, called NAWI (National Alliance for Water Innovation)
Established ‘community watershed” in the Upper Gunnison East River of Colorado, which nucleates investigators from three national labs, 28 universities, six federal and state agencies, three local stakeholders and six small businesses to tackle together questions that are difficult to do alone
Establishing world-first bedrock through atmosphere observatory in mountainous East River watershed of Colorado
Used remotely sensed information to develop 4D East River Watershed digital twin, and machine-learning approaches to identify watershed organization, or watershed ‘functional zones’
Developing world-first scale-adaptive watershed simulation capability to enable “telescoping” into regions to predict hydrobiogeochemical processes may have an outsized impact on larger watershed behavior
Advancing the first systematic approach to use machine learning and toward exascale simulation for advancing prediction of watershed hydrobiogeochemistry
Used integrated hydrological model in Sierra mountains to document impact of fire on groundwater recharge and to assess the impacts of end of century climate extremes on water resources in California
Developed new approaches for multi-scale assessment of groundwater resources and changes and new computational methods for groundwater recharge siting and implementation
Demonstrated coupled subsurface modeling with remote sensing for tracking California groundwater resources
Investigated fundamental biogeochemical reactions occurring during membrane treatment of unconventional water sources with the objective of improving energy efficiency and reducing operational costs
Investigated biological treatment of high saline wastewater for the purpose of industrial reuse
Conducted hazard and risk assessment of how produced waters can be safely and effectively integrated for agriculture and other beneficial reuse
Established test-bed facility for integrated modeling and pilot-demonstration of unconventional water treatment technology
Initiated critical material recovery from industrial and geothermal waters
Developed a comprehensive reaction network to assess the impact of AgMAR strategies on N cycling in the deep vadose zone sediments of an agricultural field site in central California

Relevant Projects

Watershed Function SFA
National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI)
Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software (IDEAS) Watersheds
Exasheds
Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL)
HyperFACETS
The Calibrated and Systematic Characterization, Attribution, and Detection of Extremes (CASCADE) Project
Investigating the Impacts of Streamflow Disturbances on Water Quality Using a Data-Driven Framework – DOE Early Career Award
Headwaters to Groundwater
Almond Board of California Groundwater Recharge Project
Impacts of California wildfires on watershed hydrology and water quality
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) and the role of food-webs, riverine exports, and climate perturbations
Brine Extraction Storage Test (BEST) Project
Clean Energy Research Center for Water-Energy Technologies (CERC-WET)
Arroyo Las Posas Stormwater Diversion Feasibility Study and Percolation Test – Ventura, CA
Geophysical Evaluation of Low Impact Development and Surface Water – Groundwater Interactions in the Los Angeles Basin
Assessment of Controls on Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems in the Consumnes River Preserve
Evaluating the Controls of Riverbed Clogging at a Riverbank Filtration Facility, Sonoma County, CA
Geophysical Assessment of the Controls on Estuary Water Salinity Quality for Salmonid Development at Goat Rock Beach, CA
Beneficial Reuse of Produced Water
Impacts of Groundwater Recharge on Nitrate Contamination
Microbiology of Produced Water Recycling and Reuse
Efficient Desalination through Better Predictive Models
Enabling Water-Energy Decision Support Using Watershed-scale Surrogate Models (LDRD)
Biochemical Reduction of Nitrate in the Deep Vadose Zone Under Managed Aquifer Recharge (DOE-SCGSR)

Partners

EESA benefits from rich partnerships with our collaborators and sponsors. See project & program links above for more information.

Several projects listed above have multiple partners. Please refer to related pages for more information such as Watershed SFA partners and NAWI Partners.