No shaving until after Halloween. UCCHM men stop shaving in October to raise awareness of water scarcity. October 1, 2012. L-R Jay Famiglietti, Kurt Solander, John Horn, AJ Purdy, Brian Thomas, Eric McWilliams, JT Reager

Water conservation in Southern California has become a heightened issue among water users over the past decade.  In the midst of a drought starting in 2005, University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling (UCCHM) water researchers have relentlessly tried to share important research findings with policy makers and the public to expose the dire need for water use awareness.  In our desperation, some of the men at UCCHM have decided to do something never done before to get our point across: STOP SHAVING.

What’s that on your face? After 2 weeks without shaving. Saving water AND looking good. Personnel as above, plus Collin Lawrence and Hrishi Chandanpurkar. October 15, 2012

This feat not only melts the hearts of women throughout our center’s suite, but also points out that there are many everyday steps men and women can take to reduce individual water footprints.  Although shaving may not take up as much water as, say, watering one’s lawn, it will bring awareness to people that leave the faucet running while brushing their teeth or let the shower run for several minutes to get the water hot.  People everywhere will be reminding themselves to think of the beard, and turn off the faucet.

A pretty hairy situation. Three weeks without shaving. Think of the gallons of water saved. October 22, 2012.

During the month of October, these burly boys have vetoed the constant upkeep of being clean shaven and instead let their beards grow in order to bring forth the important message that most Southern Californians overuse water.  Our research necessitates a concerted effort to reduce our water footprints and we hope to spread the word.  We will see you next October 2013, to join our mission for a more sustainable water future for Southern California.

We made it! Thanks my bearded brothers for helping raise awareness about water scarcity. (L-R) Jay Famiglietti, Kurt Solander, John Horn, AJ Purdy, Brian Thomas, Eric McWilliams, JT Reager, Collin Lawrence, Hrishi Chandanpurkar. November 2, 2012.

We’re already making plans for 2013…see you next fall for Oktobeardfest!

At TMI, I work under the High Mountain Glacial Watershed Program.  Our projects seek to facilitate community watershed management and to develop mitigation strategies to address new threats that are emerging due to climate change.  In particular, we focus on newly formed glacial lakes that pose high risk of a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF).  In Nepal, the impact of a GLOF event would be devastating.  One lake in particular, Imja Lake, would wipe out homes, inundate agricultural land, and engulf significant portions of the Everest Base Camp trail, which would cause tourism in the region, and in Nepal as a whole, to dramatically decline.

So what are we doing about it?

Our work at The Mountain Institute is two-fold.  For all of our water projects, we have both a technical evaluation that typically involves hydrological and engineering analysis as well as a community engagement component to collaborate with downstream villages to manage their changing water resources more effectively.  Our Glacial Lake Rapid Reconnaissance team is attempting to conduct GPR surveys, collect bathymetric data, and provides a first-round analysis of the stability of new and emerging glacial lakes in the Himalayas and Andes.  On the social science side, we share all of our results with local communities in an attempt to collaborate to develop watershed management and climate adaptation plans.

Morning Activities at Dudh Pokhari Lake. Photo by: Kate Voss

In the past year, we’ve had three fieldwork seasons in September 2011, May 2012, and July 2012 to analyze some of Nepal and Peru’s most dangerous glacial lakes, talk with downstream communities, and begin developing potential solutions to mitigate the risk of a GLOF.  Solutions can range from technical engineering (constructing an outlet to drain the lake and use the runoff for micro-hydropower) to simple land use change (moving homes out of the floodplain).  The solutions must be technically sound and data-driven as well as fully supported by the Nepali or Peruvian people living in the region.

Tengboche Monastery. Photo by: Kate Voss

During a six-week expedition in Nepal in May 2012 we deployed the Rapid Reconnaissance team and visited three potentially dangerous lakes, including Imja Lake in the Khumbu (Everest) region, to conduct ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys and to begin discussion with communities about their vulnerabilities and adaptation strategies to reduce the impacts of a potential GLOF.  The GPR data is essential to understand the composition of the moraine – where is there ice?  Where is the debris?  How thick are the layers?  At what depth do we hit bedrock?  All of these data inform us about the stability of the lake’s moraines and can help the engineers determine which solutions are technically feasible.

GPR Team Making a Traverse on Imja Lake’s Terminal Moraine. Photo by: Stephanie Spray

But let me tell you, traversing a glacial lake moraine with GPR equipment (which consists of a transmitter, receiver, and antennae of numerous lengths) at 5100 meters (16,752 feet) above sea level is a challenge.  Trudging over loose skree and gravel makes for slow steps and lots of twisted ankles.  And the effects of altitude make your mind a little fuzzy.  But the 24/7 views of the Himalayas, the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, and the joy of being out in the wilderness for weeks at a time make any nuisance simply that- inconsequential.

In addition to our work in the Himalayas, we also conduct similar projects in the Andes.  Peru has over 50 years of experience mitigating GLOFs and working with communities to manage water resources.  The motivation behind connecting our work in Nepal and Peru is that we will be able to learn about the processes developed in the Andes, soak in the Peruvian knowledge, and see if we can transfer any of it the experience in Nepal.  This Nepal-Peru exchange is a unique opportunity to use global knowledge to address local issues and address some of the most pressing climate change threats in the high mountains and glacial watersheds!

If you want to hear more, you can watch a film about our work here.

UCI hydrology students in a scene from Last Call at the Oasis

This post was originally published on the Huffington Post on June 19, 2012

Let’s face it. In the U. S., most of us have every expectation that when we turn on our faucets, a clear, crisp stream of cold (or hot, or any other temperature that our hearts’ desire), water will gush forth.  In fact, it’s nearly impossible to imagine life in our country under any other circumstances.

Well, it’s time for a wake-up call. As with the Gold Rush, Big Oil, Infinite Timber, and more, in spite of our tremendous capacity to deny the facts, Earth’s resources are, sadly, limited.  They must be properly managed to assure their availability for the long run.  Even in our beloved land of plenty, we are now forced to confront an ever-increasing list of water challenges, from polluted rivers and lakes in the East, to water shortages in the West, and from prolonged drought in the South to contaminated groundwater, well, all over the place.

As a professor of hydrology, this is the heavy stuff of my teaching and research. It is a difficult message to deliver, both to my students and to the general public.  It’s not a pretty picture, and it should not be sugar coated.  Thankfully, I find that just a tiny fraction of my audience is apathetic, while the vast majority is typically motivated to take some sort of action, no matter how small.  I’ve come to appreciate that the public cares deeply about water (consider the bottled water craze, the market for in-home water filters, the rising popularity of reusable water bottles and more sustainable lifestyles), and wants to maintain that reliable flow to our homes and farms, while still preserving our environment.

Jay Famiglietti and the UCI hydrology team with Jessica Yu, Elise Pearlstein and the crew from Last Call at the Oasis. April, 2010

But as a teacher and researcher, my reach is small, yet people want and need to know what’s going on with their water.  And that’s where enviro-docs like Participant Media’s (An Inconvenient Truth, Food, Inc., Waiting for Superman)/ATO Pictures Last Call at the Oasis come in. Given my personal commitment to communicating our critical water research findings to the public, when Academy Award-nominated Producer Elise Pearlstein (Food, Inc.) contacted me about contributing to Last Call, it was a no-brainer.

What Pearlstein and Academy Award-winning director Jessica Yu (Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien) ultimately delivered is a masterful work that paints America’s water landscape in all of its harshly realistic glory.  Last Call gives us no-holds-barred insights into several of the world’s key water issues, including how they are already impacting us here in the United States.

But, Last Call at the Oasis is not all doom and gloom.  It’s smart, it’s zippy, it’s honest, and it’s at times gut wrenching.  It’s a wonderful blend of expert opinion with stunning cinematography, clever editing and an original, hauntingly elegant score. And Yu and Pearlstein remind us that laughter is good for the soul, even when our environment is under duress: Last Call is funny, and it’s okay to laugh.  And, Last Call gives us hope that we can manage our water future, but only if we begin to act now.

But I’m not writing this post to review the movie. That’s been done by the press, and they like Last Call very much.  I’m writing this as a teacher who has used several films through the years to supplement classroom learning. Let me be clear about this: you, your families, your neighbors and your co-workers all need to see this eye opener of a movie.  It will make you think. It will make you talk about how much we’ve taken the availability of clean, fresh water for granted.  And it will probably convince you that those days are coming to a rapid close.

The trouble is that Last Call is not playing in many places.  It is a documentary after all, and this is the season for action, entertainment and summer fun.  Enter TUGG, an innovative new platform for movie distribution that allows any person, group or organization to bring Last Call to a local theater.  Interested parties can request a screening through the TUGG website, and if a threshold number of tickets is sold in advance (often around 50) then the screening is confirmed.  As an incentive, organizers retain 5% of ticket sales, and also have the chance for their organization to be featured on the DVD release of Last Call.

An important subtext of Last Call at the Oasis is that it is no longer socially, politically or even legally acceptable to trash Earth’s waters in the name of economic growth and ‘progress.’  We now know too much about how our environment functions to continue to overtax our water supply and to use it as our national dumping grounds.  It’s time to move past that phase of our growth as a nation.  Please spread the word about Last Call, including opportunities for local screenings using TUGG, to help this message reach the widest possible audience.

The following will appear in the July 2012 newsletter of the AGU Hydrology Section as part of the Fellows Speak series.

Given a rare opportunity to communicate to our section, I want to focus this note on some key things that we don’t know and can’t do, rather than patting ourselves on the back too much.

Bur first…a little back-patting! For context, here’s some background on what we do in my group. First, we work to make the hydrology in climate models, like those used in the IPCC, increasingly more realistic. Second, we use satellites to explore how the water cycle, and with it, water availability, is changing.   The community that works on these issues is not large, but it is dedicated. There is no question that we should be proud of our advances over the past couple of decades.

For example, we can now simulate the water cycle with improved accuracy across multiple scales. Our computer models, from the hillslope to the GCM scale, are running at higher resolution, with greater fidelity, and are providing unprecedented insights into process interactions, while enabling new science.

Likewise, satellites are now revealing that the pace of water cycle change is greater than we thought, and not surprisingly, that the human fingerprint on our water landscape, due to water use, water management and land use change, is severe, and is global in scope.

We’re making great progress as a community. That’s for certain. However, observations from the GRACE mission, and my involvement with CUAHSI, have forced me to confront some key issues that I don’t believe that we are prepared to address.  For example: how can we expect our models to simulate the synoptic patterns of water storage changes that we see from GRACE, which are in large part human driven, if water management practices (e.g. groundwater pumping, irrigation, reservoir storage, conveyance) are not well represented in our land surface models?

In parallel, my work with CUAHSI on the Community Hydrologic Modeling Platform (CHyMP) has greatly raised my awareness of other critical unknowns on the data side.  In short, in my opinion, our nation’s hydrologic modeling assets are simply not up to the task of addressing our most pressing societal issues of food, energy, water and national security.  We are behind where we need to be, and we are falling behind other nations.

To illustrate, here are a few of what I’ve been calling the ‘unfortunate realities’ of modern hydrology.

1)    We don’t know how much fresh water we have on land. Not stored as groundwater, or surface water, as soil moisture, or as snow.  Believe it. It’s true.  Many estimates, for example, of continental scale groundwater supplies, are simply guesses based on ad hoc assumptions.  Others are reports of water storage in man-made reservoirs. It is unclear to me how we can address sustainable water management without knowing how much water is actually on and in the ground.

2)    Our knowledge of Earth’s surface and shallow subsurface, i.e. it’s water environment, including its digital representation, remains appallingly insufficient.  At the surface, we know little about the bathymetry of rivers and lakes.  We have no idea how deep our soils are, at least at the larger regional, national and global scales. While two-dimensional maps of global hydrogeology are now available, the third dimension, as well as basic aquifer parameters, remain a mystery at national and global scales.

3)    Our global monitoring system…for river discharge, for groundwater extraction, for water use…is insufficient for tracking even the most fundamental changes in water storage and availability. It doesn’t have to be that way, but for a host of political and socioeconomic reasons, it is.

To review then: we don’t really know how much water we have; we don’t have a detailed picture of our water environment; and we don’t do such a great job of measuring its storage and flows within it. How in the world have we let this happen?

I believe it’s because we haven’t rallied around core questions of societal relevance. The typical excuse that we give is that — these are not science questions. Or — these are too applied.  However, we can no longer afford the luxury of such academic arrogance.

Every single one of us works on some aspect of sustainable water management.  But let’s face facts: we simply cannot manage water sustainably until we can answer the following three questions.  How much water do we have — as snow, surface water, soil moisture and groundwater? How much do we need — for humans and for the environment?  And, how are these changing with time – with climate change and with increased understanding and adaptation? Society wants to know, we can provide the answers, and virtually all of our research fits under this broad umbrella of water sustainability.

It is time for us to move forward with core observations and models that can utilize them to predict and help prepare for the future. Getting there requires both top-down and bottom-up engagement.

From the top, commitment and focus is required at the national and state agency levels.  Vision and leadership is required at the program manager, division and directorate levels.  We must make a significant investment in the tools – namely models, observations and data products and information systems –to enable the critical science, applications and solution strategies that society demands, and that our community is capable of delivering.

From the bottom, it behooves us to rally around key societal questions including the known unknowns discussed above.  And we must recognize that it is our responsibility to communicate these key issues, in order to educate our elected officials and to motivate their support.   Other communities do it. It’s time for us to do so as well.

More broadly, our public, our teaching, our research, and our environment, will be best served if we embrace the communication challenge of elevating water issues to the level of everyday understanding.