This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
0846244 Goodall
The principal objective of this proposal is to advance integrated modeling as an approach for building next generation watershed models to support environmental management. Integrated modeling is a systems-based approach for constructing models through the use of predefined modeling components. Each component represents some spatially-explicit system process, and the modeler defines how these components are coupled to simulate system response. Because components can be developed and maintained by different groups, yet can still be coupled within a modeling system, integrated modeling offers a transformative approach for constructing next generation, community-supported environmental models. This project will address a fundamental question in integrated modeling, that is the transfer of boundary conditions between spatially and temporally misaligned components, and produce results that will be used in future efforts in integrated modeling. This project will focus on the following research tasks to advance the science and adoption of integrated modeling: (1) to investigate scaling issues in integrated modeling, in particular algorithms for transferring values between coupled process-level components that operate on different spatial or temporal scales; (2) to prototype a set of process-level components for an integrated modeling system and apply these components to improve understanding of the performance and accuracy of integrated modeling approaches; and (3) to educate a new generation of environmental modelers in integrated modeling techniques to foster a community of integrated watershed modelers. If successful, this project will provide important guidance to integrated watershed modeling activities in the U.S. and abroad.
The educational merit of this project will be to engage and mentor a new generation of watershed modelers in integrated modeling approaches. In addition to incorporating the basic skills and methods needed for integrated modeling into the engineering courses that I teach, the project will organize and host a summer workshop where an interdisciplinary group of graduate and undergraduate students will work together to prototype an integrated model for a local watershed. The educational and research activities will be integrated throughout the project duration by having the tools that result from the research plan used by students in the educational plan, and by using the feedback received from the students in the educational plan to enhance the user-friendliness of the tools developed in the research plan.
The broader impacts of this research will be to the U.S. environmental policy arena through the interest of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in integrated modeling approaches, to various scientific disciplines including the hydrologic and surface dynamics communities through their efforts to build cyberinfrastructure, and to the international water management community through collaborations with an international standards organization. Also, this research will involve underrepresented groups by both utilizing existing programs at the University of South Carolina that aim to involve minority students in graduate research and through my leadership in the formulation of a watershed management plan for a local watershed in South Carolina that is home to a significant percentage of minority residents.
