Previous EPSCoR News

Nearly 50 researchers are converging on Red Butte Creek this week in a coordinated effort to understand the watershed like never before.  The “synoptic sampling” event organized by iUTAH researcher and University of Utah hydrologist Paul Brooks brings together faculty and students from the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, Utah State University, Utah Valley University, Westminster College, and elsewhere to take a comprehensive “snapshot” of the water and surrounding land and air to better understand how to maintain a safe, stable water supply in the face of growing demand for water and a changing climate. To learn more you can read, watch, and listen to what Salt Lake City-based news outlets have had to say about the event:

• Salt Lake Tribune
• Fox 13 Now
• KUER News

Science teachers for grades 8 through 12 are invited to register for CI-WATER for Science Educators, a two-hour professional development workshop for integrating water science and modeling resources into the science curriculum.

The workshop will be held at the Utah’s Hogle Zoo Education Center on Tuesday, August 4 from 1 to 3 p.m. The event is free to participants but seating is limited, so reservations are required.

Participants will learn about CI-WATER educator resources and engage in activities they can bring to their students.

“Water is no longer something we can simply take for granted. This workshop will help teachers prepare students for the future in which computer modeling will play an even greater role in water resource management,” says Chris Schmitz, Education Director at Hogle Zoo.

To register for the workshop or for more information, email Utah’s Hogle Zoo’s, Academic and Community Programs Coordinator, Suzanne Zgraggen.

With support from the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF-EPSCoR), CI-WATER researchers have found a new approach that may revolutionize large-scale water modeling methods.

The discovery is of an alternative to a partial differential equation (PDE) that was published more than eighty years ago by soil physicist Lorenzo Adolph Richards.

“Previous solutions to the Richards equation are computationally expensive to run, unreliable and suffer from convergence problems,” says Dr. Fred Ogden, a CI-WATER Principle Investigator and lead author of the paper reporting the discovery. “We were looking for a faster, more reliable approach that conserves mass and is continuous.”

It seems that Fred and his collaborators have found it. An eight-month test to compare the predictive capabilities of the Richards’ PDE to the new “Finite-Water Content” solution in loam soil resulted in a minor variance, and the latter solution appears to be robust, complete and more computationally economical—important when running data-massive simulations such as CI-WATER’s high-resolution, large-scale ADHydro model.

Details of the work were published in “A new general 1-D vadose zone flow solution method,” recently appearing in Water Resources Research, a publication of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). ADHydro, and other CI-WATER products, will be featured during the CUAHSI 3rd Annual Hydroinfomatics Conference next month.

CI-WATER is pleased to announce the achievement of a major project milestone with the public release of the Tethys Platform for water resources web application development. Designed to make it easier for developers to turn models and data into interactive apps, Tethys is a flexible, accessible solution that eases the learning curve needed to create the tools water resource analysts need.

Tethys has already been used by CI-WATER modelers to create the Parleys Creek Management Tool described in the CI-WATER newsfeed article “Project Update: Collaboration leads to integrated water management tools” (Sept. 27, 2014). Soon, CI-WATER researchers at the University of Wyoming will be collaborating with Brigham Young University’s Tethys development group to visualize their output data sets.

Lead developer Nathan Swain says, “That will present a fun challenge because they have really huge data sets.”

Even more exciting, the platform is receiving attention from the broader water science community. Nathan’s group is currently preparing for National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE) at which numerous graduate students in hydroinformatics will gather for what Nathan calls “kind of a hack-a-thon.”

“The goal of our participation in NFIE is to promote Tethys as a tool for other participants and apply it to a relevant, real-world problem,” Nathan says.

To access Tethys, visit http://tethys.ci-water.org/. Note that users can subscribe to receive email updates.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1135482.