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.
Publication Highlights
Determining the impact of a severe dry to wet transition on watershed hydrodynamics in California, USA with an integrated hydrologic model, Maina et al., 2020, J Hydrol, 580, 124358
Sequential imputation of missing spatio-temporal precipitation data using Random Forests, Mital et al., (in press), Frontiers in Water
East River Colorado Watershed: Mountainous Community Testbed…, Hubbard et al., 2018, Vadose Zone Journal, 17(1), 1-25
The changing character of the California Sierra Nevada as a Natural Reservoir, Rhoades et al., 2018, Geophysical Research Letters, 45(23), 13-008
A Transdisciplinary Approach to Characterize Hydrological Controls on Groundwater-Dependent Ecosystem Health, Rohde et al., 2019, Frontiers in Environmental Science, 7, 175.
Simulating bioclogging effects on dynamic riverbed permeability and infiltration, Newcomer, et al., 2016, Water Resources Research, 52(4), pp.2883-2900
Satellite-based monitoring of groundwater depletion in California’s Central Valley, Vasco, et al., 2019, Scientific Reports 9
Surrogate optimization of deep neural networks for groundwater predictions, Müller, et al., 2020, Journal of Global Optimization
Geochemical Exports to River from the Intra-Meander Hyporheic Zone under Transient Hydrologic Conditions: East River Mountainous Watershed, Colorado, Dwivedi, et al., 2018, Water Resources Research, 54:10
Other publications associated with the Watershed SFA project available here.
News Coverage
$100M Innovation Hub to accelerate R&D for a Secure Water Future
Microbial strategies for treating produced water
Exasheds
ExaSheds: Advancing Watershed System Understanding through Exascale Simulation and Machine Learning
Viticulture specialists sound off on expanding grape production, efficiency
Lively exchanges on SJV water imbalance, global wine production
Headwaters to Groundwater
Understanding Effects of Climate Change on California Watersheds
Scientists Dig Deep to Track Down California’s Ever-Changing Groundwater Supply
Is this the answer to California’s water whiplash?
Like Oil and Water: The Arroyo Grande oil field and nearby domestic drinking wells
How California Wildfires Can Impact Water Availability
Fire, Then Water: The Landscape After A Burn
Wildfires Affect Water Resources Long After the Smoke Clears
NERSC shuts down supercomputers amid PG&E blackout
NERSC Powers Research on Post-Wildfire Water Availability
There’s a silver lining to California’s wildfires: More snowpack and water storage, study finds (Merced Sun-Star)
There’s a silver lining to California’s wildfires: More snowpack and water storage, study finds (Sac Bee)
Berkeley Lab study finds California wildfires increase runoff, groundwater
Surrogate LDRD
Meet GEM Fellow and EESA Summer Intern Tadewos Getachew
To Pump or Not to Pump: New Tool Will Help Water Managers Make Smarter Decisions (LBNL)
Scientists develop a powerful computational tool for groundwater management
To Pump or Not to Pump: New Tool Will Help Water Managers Make Smarter Decisions (News Wise)
Watershed SFA
Deeply Talks: Drought on the Colorado – Can We Adapt to Changing Runoff?
How Drought and Other Extremes Impact Water Pollution (EESA)
How Drought And Other Extremes Impact Water Pollution (Water Online)
Pi me a river: A meandering tale of pi, rivers, and water quality
DOE SCGSR
Student Spotlight: Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Student Hannah Waterhouse
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