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Page 6
2—
Science Foundations and Basic Processes
Predictability and Variability of
Regional and Global Water Cycles
The cycling of water in its various states—solid, liquid,
and gaseous—is a primary process within the Earth's climate
system. Information on variability of states and fluxes over time
is crucial for the understanding of the sustainability of local,
regional, national, and international economies and ecosystems. It
is essential to establish rates of cycling, changes in these
resulting from human intervention, and the consequences of those
changes for regional water availability. It is important to
estimate the magnitude of potential changes in water reservoirs at
the land surface (e.g., lakes, seasonal snow-packs, soil moisture,
groundwater, glaciers, and ice sheets), changes in fluxes of water
(e.g., precipitation, evaporation, runoff, and groundwater
recharge), and changes in atmospheric water storage and transport,
all of which have profound influences on the Earth's energy cycle
and global change processes. Toward this end, a better
understanding is needed of what causes both short-term and
long-term variability in these fluxes that couple the land surface
reservoirs of water with each other as well as with the oceans and
atmosphere. It is a priority scientific objective to establish how
much of the variability in the water cycle is predictable over a
range of time and space scales.
Large-scale seasonal-to-interannual oscillations in climate have
been shown to contribute significantly to the total variability in
precipitation and temperature in some regions. These predictable
patterns of variability create excellent opportunities for
improving long-lead hydrologic forecasts based on measurements of
climate indicators such as sea-surface temperature or snow-cover
patterns.
An understanding of mechanisms linking large-scale climate
variability with regional conditions also forms the basis for
reducing the uncertainty associated with assessing regional impacts
of global change over decadal-to-centennial periods. A
region-specific ability to project the consequences of global
change is now required, for example, by decision-makers concerned
with long-term fixed capital investments in infrastructure such as
dams, water diversion systems, and flood damage mitigation systems
that are vulnerable to shifts in hydroclimatic regime. It is also
required by policy makers debating whether possible shifts in
hydroclimatic regime warrant increased measures to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions (USGCRP, 1999).
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Page 6
2—
Science Foundations and Basic Processes
Predictability and Variability of
Regional and Global Water Cycles
The cycling of water in its various states—solid, liquid,
and gaseous—is a primary process within the Earth's climate
system. Information on variability of states and fluxes over time
is crucial for the understanding of the sustainability of local,
regional, national, and international economies and ecosystems. It
is essential to establish rates of cycling, changes in these
resulting from human intervention, and the consequences of those
changes for regional water availability. It is important to
estimate the magnitude of potential changes in water reservoirs at
the land surface (e.g., lakes, seasonal snow-packs, soil moisture,
groundwater, glaciers, and ice sheets), changes in fluxes of water
(e.g., precipitation, evaporation, runoff, and groundwater
recharge), and changes in atmospheric water storage and transport,
all of which have profound influences on the Earth's energy cycle
and global change processes. Toward this end, a better
understanding is needed of what causes both short-term and
long-term variability in these fluxes that couple the land surface
reservoirs of water with each other as well as with the oceans and
atmosphere. It is a priority scientific objective to establish how
much of the variability in the water cycle is predictable over a
range of time and space scales.
Large-scale seasonal-to-interannual oscillations in climate have
been shown to contribute significantly to the total variability in
precipitation and temperature in some regions. These predictable
patterns of variability create excellent opportunities for
improving long-lead hydrologic forecasts based on measurements of
climate indicators such as sea-surface temperature or snow-cover
patterns.
An understanding of mechanisms linking large-scale climate
variability with regional conditions also forms the basis for
reducing the uncertainty associated with assessing regional impacts
of global change over decadal-to-centennial periods. A
region-specific ability to project the consequences of global
change is now required, for example, by decision-makers concerned
with long-term fixed capital investments in infrastructure such as
dams, water diversion systems, and flood damage mitigation systems
that are vulnerable to shifts in hydroclimatic regime. It is also
required by policy makers debating whether possible shifts in
hydroclimatic regime warrant increased measures to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions (USGCRP, 1999).
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Page 7
The continental hydrologic cycle is the link between climate
forcing at the large scale and surface impacts at the regional
scale. Understanding how variabilities in regional hydrologic
cycles are linked to large-scale climate is a research priority in
both the hydrologic and climate sciences (NRC, 1998b).
Key challenges for hydrologic science are to define spatial and
temporal regimes of hydrologic systems in which predictability is
high and to characterize and understand the nature of variability
in hydrologic systems. These two challenges are interrelated.
Predictability is the extent to which the future state of a
system can be estimated based upon the (theoretical) availability
of a comprehensive set of observations characterizing the system's
initial condition. Once a hydrologic system has been shown to
possess a substantial degree of predictability, useful prediction
schemes can be devised to estimate the response of the system to
external forcing (e.g., land use changes) or to variability of the
climate system. The estimation of this response requires an
in-depth understanding of (1) the relative contributions of local
and remote forcing mechanisms to the total variability in
hydrologic systems, (2) the changes in the response and the
characteristics of hydrologic systems as they are monitored or
modeled at different spatial and temporal resolutions, and (3) the
nature of local and regional feedback mechanisms that affect the
response of hydrologic systems to local and external forcing
factors.
In this respect, the ability to make useful
predictions—e.g., weather forecasting at a local scale (about
1–10 Km) for hazards mitigation, preparation of water supply
outlooks at the basin scale, and water availability projections
under global change at a regional scale (about 102 to 103 km)—requires that the cycling
pathways, the storage of water, and the nature of variability for
physical processes be measured and understood.
Predictable Patterns of
Seasonal-to-Interannual Variability
Issues of predictability form the essence of the scientific
challenges associated with seasonal-to-interannual climate
variability. The land, biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans are
coupled together in an Earth system that has a wide range of time
and space scales in its variability. For example, there are "slow"
(e.g., deep groundwater and oceans) and "fast" (e.g., atmospheric
water vapor and surface moisture) components in this system, whose
rate of reaction is controlled in part by reservoir size, by the
intrinsic rates of the processes involved, and by interactions with
other processes.
The superposed variations with a variety of time scales means
that there is potentially some predictability if the "slow"
components can be isolated and monitored. For example, coupled
air-sea interactions across the large tropical Pacific basin result
in large-scale changes in climate that appear with some regularity
(quasiperiodic) on a 2- to 6-year time scale. This phenomenon,
known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), has strong
implications for hydroclimatic anomalies across the tropics, and it
also affects conditions in the extratropics (NRC, 1998b). If the
ENSO signal is linked to regional precipitation and temperature,
then seasons-ahead predictions of the phenomenon can provide a
means of narrowing the uncertainty associated with long-lead
hydrologic predictions. The implications of such predictability for
managing water resources, agriculture, electric power, and other
climate-sensitive sectors are far-reaching (see Box A). ENSO is
just one example; there are other phenomena in the Earth system
that cause variations on inter-annual and longer time scales. For
example, feedback between the atmosphere and snow cover, land
moisture, vegetation cover, and regional water bodies other than
the Pacific also induces systematic oscillations and excursions in
regional climate.
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Three key scientific questions in hydrologic science related to
variability in the global water cycle and its regional
seasonal-to-interannual predictability are as follows:
• The effects of large-scale seasonal-to-interannual
oscillations in climate caused by interactions between land,
oceans, and the atmosphere are apparent in many hydrologic records.
The physical processes and cause-effect relations, however, are not
understood well enough to support the design and implementation of
forecasts that are sufficiently robust to be relied upon for
regional water-related decision-making. To what extent is
regional-scale hydrology predictable? What types and locations of
measurements will most enhance predictions?
• Predictability of regional hydrologic systems is limited
to large-scale climate predictability if forcing is unidirectional,
i.e., large-scale climate affects regional hydrologic systems. If
there is two-way land-atmosphere coupling or modulation of climate
by local hydrologic processes, then there is potentially enhanced
predictability gained through coupled hydrologic modeling.
Across which regions and seasons can predictions of regional water
cycling be enhanced by robust coupled land-atmosphere
modeling?
• Hydrologic extremes (e.g., droughts and floods) may be
influenced by large-scale climate variability and local
land-atmosphere exchanges in ways that are quite distinct from how
those influences affect regional hydroclimate under near-normal
conditions. Current hydrologic forecasts (e.g., water supply
outlooks or flow forecasts) are better at predicting near-normal.
conditions than they are at predicting extremes. Yet in terms of
economic and environmental impact, predicting extremes is of much
greater regional importance. What special physical and
statistical features (e.g., process pathways, influences across
scales) can be used to link large-scale climate and regional-scale
hydrology in the case of extreme events, and how are these features
different for the case of floods and the case of persistent
droughts?
Sources of Long-Term Variability
Variability in hydrologic records includes contributions from
both natural variability and human-induced changes of the landscape
and climate. There are at least two critical gaps that research
must address to separate the total variability into natural and
human-induced contributions. First, the causes and spatial patterns
of natural variability from both measured and paleoclimate records
need to be understood. For example, tree-ring records in the
southwestern United States show evidence of prolonged droughts that
greatly exceed the magnitude and duration of droughts in the
measured record, principally during the past 100 years. The extent
and seventy of these events within the region and the link to
large-scale climate changes are not known. Second, it needs to be
ensured that in future decades, scientists have the long-term
hydrologic measurements needed to detect changes and that they have
the understanding to link those changes to alterations in the
landscape and in the broader-scale climate system. For example,
observations are currently lacking to detect a change in the mass
of the Earth's largest freshwater reservoirs, the polar ice sheets,
to within 25 percent of the annual accumulation (Houghton et al.,
1996). Further, the amounts and spatial patterns of groundwater
recharge to critical water supply aquifers in the United States and
other parts of the world have never been measured, in part because
of a lack of understanding of how to make accurate measurements of
recharge rates (Simmers, 1988).
Two key questions in hydrologic science related to understanding
long-term sources of variability are the following:
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Box A
Use of Seasonal Forecasts
The Salt River Project (SRP) is the largest
provider of water and electricity in Arizona, delivering over 300
billion gallons of water per year to over one million persons, to
industry, and to 238,000 acres of irrigated land in the
metropolitan Phoenix area. SRP's water sources include both local
groundwater and surface water from the 13,000-square-mile watershed
of the Salt River, which originates in the mountains of eastern
Arizona, and the Verde River, which flows from the north. SRP makes
commitments to water allocations 6–12-months in advance based
on reservoir storage levels. Over the long term, groundwater makes
up about 10 percent of SRP's total delivery, though it can provide
up to 30 percent of the total demand in a dry year when runoff is
low. Much of the surface runoff originates as winter snowfall,
making accurate forecasting of winter precipitation the primary
year-to-year water supply question facing SRP. In the 1998 water
year, which was a strong El Niño year, SRP for the first
time used the seasonal forecast of a wet winter to influence its
reservoir operations. SRP lowered water levels in the fall of 1997,
in anticipation of a wet winter, to provide the water that they
committed to deliver and to reduce the chance of spilling excess
water the following year. The result was a savings of about $1.4
million from the reduction in the costs of groundwater pumping. As
forecast, 1998 was a very wet year in the Southwest. Had it been an
average or dry year, SRP would have had to spend an additional $3
million to $5 million in groundwater pumping costs to make up the
shortfall. Owing to the success of the strong El Niño signal
in predicting winter precipitation in the Southwest in 1998, SRP
plans to continue to use seasonal forecasts in decision-making and
is helping drive research agendas for improved forecast
information.
• Accurate and long-term measurements, both for
understanding past variability and detecting future changes, are
critical. From a water-resources standpoint, the long-term events
of greatest concern are sustained droughts and increases in the
magnitude and frequency of floods. However, this issue goes well
beyond water resources, concerning essentially all of the Earth's
hydrologic systems. What combination of remote and in situ
observations and paleohydrologic records are required to identify
shifts in regional and local hydrologic properties resulting from
both natural and human-induced factors?
• Shifts in regional hydroclimate are linked to large-scale
patterns that change over long time scales. Understanding linkages
between regional and large-scale processes is essential to
interpreting the record of past variability and to using that
record as an analog of the expected shifts in regional water
availability under global change conditions. Are there spatial
patterns in the variability of the hydrologic record that may serve
as reliable predictors of the impacts of global change?
Linking Measurements and Understanding
across Scales
Each process contributing to a hydrologic response, such as
evaporation, snowmelt, surface runoff, or subsurface flow, has its
own set of characteristic spatial and temporal scales. For example,
the spatial resolution at which atmospheric systems are modeled is
from 100 to 10,000 times the scale of heterogeneities in land
surface topography, vegetation, soil texture, or snow cover.
Similarly, variables like temperature or soil moisture can change
significantly in a matter of hours, whereas vegetation changes
occur seasonally. Measurements and models need to be designed so
that they can aggregate processes at disparate scales.
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Besides the variability in the original processes, some new
scales of variability emerge when processes are coupled together.
The critical challenge for hydrologic science is to understand and
describe the ways in which heterogeneous processes interact with
one another at different scales to produce the variability found in
hydrologic systems. That understanding must then be translated into
enhanced predictions. Two key questions follow:
• Advances in measurement technologies allow topographic,
soil, vegetation and snow properties, and other parameters to be
specified at finer and finer scales in predictive models. There are
computational limitations, however, on the ability of hydroclimatic
models to incorporate all processes and scales. Thus, a key
question is to what extent the spatial structure and magnitude of
the (fine-scale) variability in a particular parameter or variable
is required for realistic modeling at the large scale (upscaling).
The answer to this question depends on the scale at which a given
process or variable interacts with other processes. For example, a
prediction of snowmelt, runoff, and groundwater recharge over days
to weeks may possibly benefit from a much finer description of soil
and vegetation properties than would land surface feedback into a
climate model for seasonal-to-interannual forecasts. For
land-atmosphere modeling where the atmospheric boundary layer is
the link in the exchanges, there is a natural spatial integration
associated with turbulent mixing. At what scales and for which
processes should the spatial structure of surface heterogeneity be
incorporated into the upscaling strategy for hydrologic
models?
• The coupling between the land, biosphere, and atmosphere
imposes strong constraints on some hydrologic processes in some
instances. For example, the diurnal cycle of surface moisture and
energy flux at local scale is strongly affected by entrainment
processes associated with the growth and collapse of the
atmospheric boundary layer. Similarly, the seasonal cycle of these
same fluxes at the regional scale is largely determined by the
radiative and energy balance of the overlying atmosphere. Of the
physical constraints that come about because of the coupling of
water and energy cycles, which may be used to bound the estimates
of local and regional hydrologic fluxes?
Coupling of Hydrologic Systems and
Ecosystems through Chemical Cycles
The supply of water and its distribution over the landscape are
primary determinants of nutrient inputs to ecosystems and to
ecosystem productivity. Evaporation of water through ecosystems is
a major control on the terrestrial branch of the hydrologic cycle.
Cycles of water, energy, nutrients, and carbon have been identified
consistently as priority cross-cutting themes in understanding
environmental change (NRC, 1998e; USGCRP, 1999). Scientists
currently lack the detailed knowledge of these coupled cycles
required to make rational choices regarding the global issue of
greenhouse gas emissions, and they lack detailed knowledge of the
local to regional issues associated with human environmental
disturbances such as land-use changes and their consequent
perturbations to water quality and flow. To make the necessary
environmental choices, which will have tremendous socioeconomic
implications, a fundamental understanding is needed of how water
exerts a controlling influence on ecosystems, and vice versa, with
special emphasis on areas where human activity is having the
greatest impact.
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Characterization of Water and Chemical
Pathways
Ecosystems and humans are affected by and rely on discharges of
water from groundwater and surface water systems. These waters
carry chemicals, including nutrients needed for survival and
contaminants such as organic solvents or pesticides. Adverse
effects include the possibility of chemical accumulation (e.g.,
selenium enrichment and increases in basin-scale salinity). Changes
in climate or land use that affect groundwater recharge can cause
changes in groundwater storage and discharge that could have
adverse effects on humans and ecosystems. To protect human
welfare and the integrity of the ecosystems on which humans depend,
understanding is needed concerning the pathways that water and
chemicals follow as they move across the landscape and through the
subsurface, as well as concerning the physical, chemical, and
biological transformations that occur along these paths.
Research has demonstrated that water and chemicals are
transported most rapidly along preferential pathways (see Box B).
The location and configuration of these pathways are influenced by
the arrangement of soils and geological units having high
permeability, as well as by cracks and fractures. Delineation of
pathways is complicated by difficulties involved in characterizing
the land surface (e.g., mapping vegetation and microtopography) and
the inability to see into the subsurface. Pathway patterns can be
postulated through the use of numerical models that track imaginary
particles, which represent water molecules and/or chemicals.
Results of such modeling studies allow scientists to quantify not
only the particle pathways themselves, but also travel times and
fluxes. The accuracy of these models depends on the
characterization of subsurface media and the specification of
boundary conditions (e.g., hydrologic fluxes).
Understanding interactions and pathways of water and chemical
exchange between surface and subsurface hydrologic systems is
impeded because there are many gaps in knowledge (e.g., measurement
and understanding of key flux variables such as evaporation and
groundwater recharge). If human welfare and the integrity of the
ecosystems on which humans depend are to be protected, it will be
necessary to address a number of priority science questions
including the following:
• Lack of knowledge of the detailed distribution of
subsurface materials is impeding the ability to track and predict
the movement of solutes, including contaminants. Subsurface imaging
has been an important tool for oil exploration for many years, and
it has been used in groundwater investigations as well, but
improved techniques are needed for addressing problems in both the
petroleum industry and for hydrogeological site characterization.
Can geophysical techniques (e.g., ground-penetrating radar and
nuclear magnetic resonance) be refined to provide ways of imaging
the subsurface to provide information on the distribution of
geologic units and preferential flow paths in a variety of complex
geological settings?
• Groundwater recharge to the water table and groundwater
discharge to oceans, lakes, wetlands, and rivers are important to
ecosystems and to human survival. Yet scientists are still
struggling to measure the spatial and temporal distribution of
groundwater recharge and discharge. Can a general methodology be
developed (e.g., using innovations in chemical, isotopic, and
thermal measurements) to measure or otherwise estimate the spatial
and temporal distribution of groundwater recharge and discharge
(and fluxes of associated chemicals) over a basin? Can preferential
paths of water and chemicals through the vadose zone be
incorporated into basin-scale recharge theories?
• Addressing large-scale problems such as basin-scale
recharge, subsurface flow paths, or salinity sources will require
an understanding of a number of fundamental issues that have been
largely neglected over the past two decades. It also will require
combining several powerful approaches that have largely
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Box B
The Need for Basic Research in Subsurface Hydrology Preferential
Flow Paths for Water and Solutes
One of the most basic problems in subsurface
hydrology concerns the pathway and rate at which water flows
through porous and fractured media. This question is of obvious
importance for irrigated agriculture, natural ecosystems,
groundwater recharge, groundwater extraction, contaminant
transport, and local, regional, and global water balances. The
theoretical foundations for understanding and the mathematical
descriptions were formed several decades ago, and incremental
improvements have been made since then. Much of the research effort
in this area over the past three decades has been linked with
regulatory agency concerns over contaminant fate and, although this
effort has supported the relatively short-term agency needs for
decision-making, basic research in fluid flow has received much
less emphasis. An example helps to illustrate the critical need for
basic research that has broad implications for hydrology.
Water moves through the vadose, or unsaturated,
zone lying between the ground surface and the water table as a
wetting front that depends largely on properties of the media and
on how fast the water is applied to the surface. The wetting front,
however, does not move uniformly. Small perturbations along the
air-water interfaces in soils and rocks give rise to fingers that
move faster than the background wetting front. The result is that
water and contaminants move and reach the water table faster and at
higher concentrations than predicted based on current models.
Whereas factors such as heterogeneity and layering are important,
fingering also occurs in relatively uniform media. Once
established, fingers in some media can elongate with time.
Instability and fingering are of concern in the petroleum industry
and limit the efficiency of secondary oil recovery, which involves
injection of a fluid to help drive oil toward production wells.
Although much has been learned from past work, basic research is
needed to provide a foundation for applications as diverse as
basin-scale recharge, salinity movement from irrigated areas, and
isolation of wastes from water supplies.
Movement of contaminants in groundwater is
controlled by preferential flow paths formed by connected
geological units of high permeability, such as a buried river
channel. It is exceedingly difficult, however, to find or predict
where these high-permeability units occur in the subsurface.
Consequently, efforts to track and predict the movement of
contaminants in the subsurface are severely impeded. Also,
contaminants that move into low-permeability units can be very
difficult to remove, complicating efforts to clean contaminated
sites (NRC, 1994).
been used independently in the past. These include (1)
traditional geologic mapping and conceptual methodologies, (2)
subsurface imaging, (3) numerical modeling, and (4) innovations in
tracer techniques. What combinations methods will enable
identifying the important flow paths for water and solutes in the
vadose zone, and in the saturated zone, at scales from smaller than
a hillslope up to regional aquifers?
Interactions between Hydrologic
Systems and Ecosystems
In aquatic ecosystems, residence times, nutrient fluxes, and
many other factors are determined by the rate at which water moves
through the hydrologic cycle, yet little is known about how most
terrestrial
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and freshwater ecosystems and the plants and animals that make
up the ecosystem respond to changes in the hydrologic cycle. Being
able to predict with confidence responses to climate variability
and to anthropogenic perturbations requires great improvement in
understanding the interactions and feedback mechanisms between
hydrologic systems and ecosystems. Several aspects of these
interactions deserve special attention:
• The next level of improvement in estimating regional
evaporation from plants is likely to result from a combination of
new observations (e.g., remote sensing) and models of vegetation
that include photosynthesis and the assimilation of nutrients.
Can coupling between the cycling of nitrogen—a limiting factor
for growth in many diverse aquatic and terrestrial
ecosystems—and the cycling of water and carbon in models of
land surface—atmosphere interactions improve the
ability to estimate regional fluxes of water in terrestrial
ecosystems?
• The water-ecosystem linkage may be strongest but least
understood in riparian systems. Riparian systems are under great
stress because of human activities. These systems harbor a large
majority of the regional biodiversity. Together with their
associated groundwater systems, riparian regions also sustain human
habitation and agriculture. Furthermore, these terrain features
convey a large fraction of the exchange between the subsurface,
surface, and atmosphere. Reliable tools for managing riparian
communities do not exist, largely because of uncertainties in (1)
riparian plant-water-nutrient relations, (2) basin boundary
conditions, (3) physical hydrologic processes, such as riparian
evaporation, over large areas, and (4) hydrological flow paths and
residence tunes. Can advances in basic knowledge of
macro/micronutrient constraints vs. other physical/climatic
constraints (e.g., water, energy) as controls on ecosystems, and
especially new approaches for understanding and describing
groundwater-surface water interactions and associated processes,
provide the necessary understanding of riparian areas?
• Long-term resource management of aquatic ecosystems must
be based on a better fundamental understanding of how
biogeochemical processes respond to the combined effects of climate
variability, e.g., changes in the flux of organic matter, acid
deposition, mineral weathering and of changes in the hydrologic
cycle related to climate warning. Lakes and streams are largely
buffered against changes in acidity by mineral weathering, the rate
of which depends on the supply of acids from both precipitation and
a basin's terrestrial ecosystem. Can sufficient knowledge of
biogeochemical cycles be developed (e.g., knowledge of long-term
mineral-weathering rates and of coupled water, carbon and nitrogen
cycling) at small catchment to lager basin scales to enable
scientists to make confident, multidecadal forecasts of basin and
ecosystem response to perturbations, particularly where future
anthropogenic effects may perturb sensitive headwater catchments
beyond what they have previously experienced?
Human Disturbances of Hydrologic
Systems and Ecosystems
Human-induced perturbations now range from local to global in
scale and may cause shifts that affect humans and ecosystems well
beyond the source of the perturbation. Hydrologic shifts appear as
changes in atmospheric water, precipitation, runoff, evaporation,
groundwater recharge, or chemical cycles. A major challenge
facing scientists lies in separating the effects of human
influences from climate variability in the hydrologic record.
Five issues of special concern regarding the hydrologic cycle,
nutrient cycles, and ecosystems follow. The first two stem largely
from global environmental issues; the latter three are related to
land-use changes.
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• Climate warming in response to increases in greenhouse
gas concentrations is expected to accelerate the rate at which
water moves through the global water cycle, with far-reaching
influences on global ecosystems and economies. It is essential to
establish current rates and possible changes in precipitation,
evaporation, runoff, recharge, and atmospheric water vapor
transports. Any assessment of climate change and of its causes and
impacts must be based on significantly better observations of the
water cycle. What are the regional changes in the rate of water
cycling and, with consequent changes in associated nutrient and
contaminant cycles, how are the structure and function of the
world's ecosystems influenced?
• Knowledge of the rate of sequestration of carbon in
lakes, reservoirs, peatlands (see Box C) and oceans, and knowledge
of controls on those rates, is essential if the United States is to
intelligently undertake measures to mitigate greenhouse gas
emissions. The total amount of carbon in the combined pools, and
the relative balance among these pools, is likely to be strongly
influenced by global warming and particularly by changes in the
water cycle. How strongly will delivery of carbon to freshwater
ecosystems and export of carbon from them be affected by changes in
the hydrologic cycle, specifically the supply of water to these
systems and in residence times within them?
• Contamination of rivers and lakes from point discharges
are often traced to the source, effectively monitored, and strongly
regulated. Contamination from nonpoint discharges remains poorly
understood and is thus virtually unregulated. Although nonpoint
source contamination occurs in both urban and rural environments,
the latter presents the greater scientific challenge. Rural
nonpoint source contamination is largely due to the erosion and
transport of soil particles, to which nutrients (largely associated
with fertilizers) and pesticides are attached. Riverine inputs of
nutrients result in extensive zones of low oxygen concentration in
coastal waters. Although the ability to describe soil erosion is
relatively good, there has been very little success in predicting
the transport of soil particles and associated contaminants over
the land surface to streams and rivers. What are the erosion
rates, fluxes, and residence times for sediments transporting
non-point-source contaminants and nutrients to downstream
ecosystems?
• Alteration of land use as a result of urban growth is
inevitable, causing shifts in hydroclimate and generally increasing
flooding and pollutant loading. There is also increased groundwater
pumping and loss of groundwater recharge associated with
urbanization. This decrease in groundwater recharge at least
partially explains the degradation of aquatic systems in urbanizing
areas. Understanding the nature of the dependence of various
aquatic ecosystems on groundwater discharge is needed.
Understanding is also needed concerning how to manage water in
urban areas to maintain adequate groundwater flows to critical
aquatic systems. What are the changes in the hydrologic cycle,
and in nutrient and contaminant cycles, caused by alterations in
land use owing to urban land use (i.e., the conversion from natural
landscape and agriculture to suburban developments)?
• Wetland ecosystems are active in the cycling of water,
nutrients, atmospheric trace gases, and carbon. Human activity has
altered major wetland regions. Restoration of wetlands is seldom
carried out based on a scientific approach. Wetland restoration is
in particular need of attention, because in most situations there
is little effort to establish, or to reconstruct, the prior
condition, and follow-up is often absent or too brief for the
degree of success to be evaluated. Can the ability to use
hydrologic science be improved substantially so that the damage to
aquatic ecosystems caused by human disturbances can be repaired
and, where possible, the ecosystem can be restored to their prior
conditions?
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Page 15
Box C:
Special Issues in High Latitudes
Ecosystems in high latitudes have been
identified as being particularly sensitive to climate variability
and warming. The critical roles of high latitudes in the global
climate system range from freshwater inflow into the Arctic Ocean
and its influence on thermohaline circulation to the modulating
effects of cool temperatures, snow, and frozen ground on seasonal
weather and hence on terrestrial ecosystem composition and
production and on the storage or release of carbon. Northern
landscapes contain vast stores of carbon capable of
influencing—if released—the global climate system. For
instance, the boreal and sub-Arctic forests of Canada (including
some peatland forests) contain about 64 billion tons of carbon,
whereas the peatlands of boreal and sub-Arctic Canada (some
forested and some open) are thought to contain about 100 billion
tons. These comprise a very considerable item in the carbon budget
of North America. Much greater knowledge of the exchange of carbon
among terrestrial, atmospheric, and oceanic systems within northern
regions is necessary because human-induced changes in climate, fire
frequency and intensity, and land use are likely to have profound
effects upon it.
Both the storage of carbon in peat and the
release of carbon by methane emissions are greatest when water
tables are high. A lowering of water tables will result in a shift
from anoxic to oxic conditions, shutting down methane emissions but
releasing carbon dioxide owing to peat oxidation. In the southern
boreal zone, climate warming may result in more frequent droughts
and may cause fires that could smolder for years in remote
peatlands, releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide and releasing
small amounts of methane as a product of incomplete combustion. On
the other hand, in the northern boreal and sub-Arctic zones, the
melting of frozen ground is likely to flood and rejuvenate many
peatlands, causing them to store carbon more effectively but also
to emit larger amounts of methane. Understanding the relative
importance of these two scenarios is critical to estimating their
influence on the global carbon cycle and their feedbacks to the
global climate system.
Recent studies of water, energy, nutrient, and
carbon cycles in northern latitudes are sufficiently mature that a
coordinated, integrated study to understand their coupling is
possible. Results from such a study are expected to include (1)
better understanding of the net ecosystem exchanges of carbon in
boreal and tundra ecosystems, including seasonal, interannual, and
decadal variability, (2) better estimates of freshwater inflow (and
associated biogeochemical fluxes) into the Arctic, including its
variability, and (3) a better understanding of the partitioning of
terrestrial water and energy fluxes and their influence on both
weather and climate at high latitudes.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
hydrologic cycle
