Predicting America's Water: The USGS Integrated Water Prediction Program

Water managers on the Delaware and Upper Colorado rivers must balance human needs against rules on water temperature and flow. U.S. Geological Survey researchers are giving them seven-day forecasts of both, built from real-time data and reservoir operations. It is an early product of a much larger effort: the USGS Integrated Water Prediction (IWP) program, which aims to forecast the nation's water in all its dimensions.

What IWP is building

Within the USGS Water Resources Mission Area, IWP develops advanced models to forecast water availability by simulating the water cycle and water quality — temperature, dissolved and suspended constituents, and the ecological conditions they produce — plus the cyberinfrastructure to run national and local models for decades to come. It works in three areas.

1. Understanding multiscale processes

IWP develops and tests new and existing models of the water budget and forecasts parts of the water cycle under scenarios of changing climate, population growth and land use, and builds integrated models of water quality, water use and ecology. The Delaware and Upper Colorado forecasts can be expanded to new basins or nationally.

The natural and human elements of the water cycle IWP aims to predict. Credit: USGS.

2. Testbeds

With the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the USGS is building a hydro-terrestrial Earth systems testbed (HyTEST): a shared computing environment to speed up and improve hydrologic model development and to benchmark models, so future development follows the best available science. One effort combines hydrology and climate into a new dataset for the continental United States spanning 40 years into the past and projecting 20 years ahead.

3. Enterprise capacity

IWP is setting the architecture and standards for integrated hydrologic modeling: cataloging existing modeling software, evaluating its design to find what holds back more advanced models, and building a community approach to maintain and evolve models over the long term. The computing strength of the USGS and other federal agencies — such as the supercomputers at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center — underpins it.

USGS supercomputers at the Earth Resources Observation and Science Center. Credit: Steven M. Young, USGS.

Sources

Based on the USGS fact sheet "Water priorities for the Nation—U.S. Geological Survey Integrated Water Prediction science program," a work of the United States government in the public domain.