#ColoradoRiver: Berkeley Lab to Lead the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area — Berkeley Lab Earth & Environmental Sciences #COriver

Here’s the release from Berkeley Lab (Maryann Villavert):

Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division Ecology Department Environmental and Biological Systems Science Program Domain Environmental Remediation & Water Resources Program Geochemistry Department Geophysics Department Hydrogeology Department

Berkeley Lab will lead the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (SFA) to quantify how perturbations to mountainous watershed—floods, drought, fire and early snowmelt—impact the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon, and metals. Researchers will observe and model watershed response to perturbations over seasonal to decadal timeframes, and from genome to watershed scales. The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research greenlighted the Watershed Function SFA earlier this week. DOE will fund the project at over $20 million for three years.

The SFA’s research site is the mountainous East River watershed in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Mountainous watersheds are recognized as the ‘water towers’ of the Earth. The Upper Colorado is perhaps the most important basin in the Western U.S.—it supplies water to more than one in ten Americans, irrigation water and nutrients to more than 5.5 million acres of land, and more than 4,200 megawatts of hydroelectric power. The East River mountainous headwaters catchment provides an ideal testbed for the team to discover and predict water and biogeochemical cycles, and how disturbances influence downstream water discharge, carbon cycles, and nutrient delivery.

“The East River catchment represents an incredible natural laboratory for pursuing research that links climate, hydrology, biogeochemistry and vegetation, with the site constituting an exciting new “community watershed” for DOE, Berkeley Lab, and their collaborating institutions,” says deputy lead Ken Williams.

“The project will develop the first ever scale-adaptive approach that will enable scientists to zoom into a watershed, simulating microbially mediated and other fine-scale processes only when and where that information is needed to accurately predict watershed behavior,” says Susan Hubbard, SFA lead. “Capabilities to predict the multi-scale response of watersheds respond to extreme weather, land use change, and climate change are not currently available, but are increasingly needed as resource managers strive to optimize hydropower, agriculture, water quality, and water resources over seasonal to annual timescales. This project will tackle that gap by developing modeling capabilities, observational tools, and deep insights about how vulnerable mountainous watersheds respond to increasingly common perturbations.”

The team is taking a ‘system of systems’ perspective to explore and simulate the aggregated response of complex multi-scale, multi-physics processes that occur across bedrock to canopy compartments. A key aspect is the development and testing of a scale-adaptive watershed simulation capability.

The project takes advantage of and integrates the team’s deep expertise in environmental microbiology, hydrology, geochemistry, ecology, geophysics, data science and computational science. The project builds on the team’s previous Genome-to-Watershed SFA efforts, and the scale-adaptive modeling will use the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a Department of Energy user facility located at Berkeley Lab.

The Watershed Function SFA is led by Susan Hubbard, the Associate Lab Director for the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab, and involves more than 65 scientists. Partner institutions are: University of California, Berkeley; Colorado School of Mines; Fort Lewis College; University of Arizona; Desert Research Institute; Navarro, Inc.; Subsurface Insights. Scientists at several other institutions also are participating.

Several Earth & Environmental Sciences Area scientists help to lead the SFA, including Ken Williams, deputy SFA lead, and team leads Eoin Brodie, Jill Banfield, Harry Beller, Tetsu Tokunaga, Nick Bouskill, Phil Long, Deb Agarwal, Peter Nico, Carl Steefel and Haruko Wainwright. Other team leads include Heidi Steltzer of Fort Lewis College and Reed Maxwell of Colorado School of Mines.

More coverage from Simmone Shaw writing for The Daily Californian:

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory received $20 million from the Department of Energy last week to lead a three-year research project in the Upper Colorado River Basin, where they will study the processes that influence water availability and water quality as a result of climate change…

The University of Oregon is working on a similar study, the Alsea project, which focuses on how logging affects watershed in Oregon creeks. Another related project, the Flood Prevention Authority, is working on a four-part plan to understand the characteristics of watershed and the changes over time that affect flooding of California’s Pajaro River, with an end goal of preventing floods.

According to Williams, the team hopes to artificially create conditions for early snow melt by the winter of 2017-18. Researchers then plan to compare and contrast how the artificial melt and snow melting in current conditions will impact their respective environments, though Williams noted that the experiments would have to be continued for multiple years to get an accurate understanding of the longterm effects of snow melt times on vegetation.

“As a resident of a state where we are fundamentally dependent on the Colorado River, I am excited to participate in a project that is looking to understand the impact of system disturbance on the Colorado River system,” Williams said.