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Page 25
4—
Applications and Knowledge Transfer
Water cycle issues affect all segments of society in all parts
of the world. Everyone has a stake in the climate, in water
resources, in the ecosystem, and in the economic implications of
changes in the amount and distribution of fresh water on Earth.
Scientific research in hydrology must have close links with
societal and stakeholder needs, or applications; it must also have
a vigorous knowledge-transfer effort that addresses kindergarten
through university education, public outreach, and transfer of
research results into practice.
Human population growth has resulted in heavy demands on the
quantity and quality of water resources worldwide. The
sustainability of these water resources in the twenty-first century
will depend on the intelligent management of water resources
systems under a more variable (and possibly warmer) future climate.
The development of improved management strategies and viable
interventions to meet these challenges will entail unprecedented
coordination and integration across a broad range of research
disciplines and segments of society.
Applications and User Integration
The increasing emphasis of the USGCRP on integrated assessment
of the regional impacts of global change, including impacts on
water resources, is fostering participatory, interactive research
involving researchers, decision-makers, resource users, educators,
and others who need more and better information about climate and
its impacts. USGCRP is also supporting efforts to improve climate
forecasting and the use of climate forecasts to manage water,
fisheries, forests, crops, and range lands at the regional and
local levels.
The term "regional assessment" is used to describe the
collection, interpretation, evaluation, and communication of
information of relevance to decision-makers, resource managers, and
other individuals interested in a specific geographic location.
Such assessments are "integrated" in several ways: (1) an
end-to-end integration, which links understanding of
ocean-atmosphere processes to regional impacts and policy
responses, (2) an interdisciplinary integration, which brings
together natural and social scientists, (3) the integration of
scales of analysis from the local to the global and from short to
long time scales, and (4) the integration of university and
government research agendas with private sector concerns and public
interests.
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Page 26
dialog with stakeholders has shown that in nearly all regions of
the United States, there is a strong demand for additional climate
information and particularly for how climate changes will affect
water availability, quality, and demand. This dialog has also
revealed critical research needs in hydrologic science that are
necessary to meet this need. Increased attention to the research
topics in Chapter 2 is supported by the assessment activities to
date, and their is a clear need to continue this sort of formal
assessment to guide the effectiveness and applications of
hydrologic research.
Education and Knowledge Transfer
Greater hydrologic literacy facilitates transfer of hydrologic
information from research to application. Promoting greater
literacy includes educating decision-makers, the public and K-12
students in order to support informed public decisions about water
issues that society will face in coming decades. New approaches in
undergraduate and graduate education that transcend the traditional
focus on hydrologic applications are needed to educate a generation
of scientists and engineers who can develop and apply advances in
hydrologic science (NRC, 1991).
The hydrologic science community should adopt a stronger sense
of responsibility for delivering timely and relevant scientific
tools (e.g., instruments, models, and procedures) to the
operational community to meet societal needs. In turn the
operational community should break the isolation that has caused
lags in incorporating advances in hydrologic science in operational
procedures. Effective two-way knowledge transfer between
researchers and the many public agencies and private sector
individuals who work with hydrology-related issues is clearly
needed.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
hydrologic science