Abstract
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Earth is a unique, living planet due to the abundance and vigorous cycling of water
throughout the global environment. Water is essential to life and directly impacts
and constrains society's welfare, progress, and sustainable growth, and is
continuously being transformed by climate change, erosion, pollution, and
engineering practices.
The water cycle is a critical resource for industry, agriculture, natural ecosystems,
fisheries, aquaculture, hydroelectric power, recreation, and water supply,
and is central to drought, flood, transportation-aviation, and disease hazards.
It is therefore a national priority to use advancements in scientific observations
and knowledge to develop solutions to the water challenges faced by society.
NASA's unique role is to use its view from space to improve water and energy cycle
monitoring and prediction. NASA has collected substantial water cycle information and
knowledge that must be transitioned to develop solutions for all twelve
National Priority Application (NPA) areas.
Therefore, we propose to develop WaterNet: The NASA Water cycle Solutions Network,
whose goal is to improve and optimize the sustained ability of water cycle researchers,
stakeholders, organizations and networks to interact, identify, harness, and extend
NASA research results to augment decision support tools and meet national needs.
We will develop WaterNet by engaging relevant NASA water cycle research resources
and community-of-practice organizations, to develop what we term an "actionable database"
that can be used to communicate and connect NASA Water cycle research Results (NWRs)
towards the improvement of water-related Decision Support Tools (DSTs).
An actionable database includes enough sufficient knowledge about its nodes
and their heritage so that connections between these nodes are identifiable and robust.
Recognizing the many existing highly valuable water-related science and application networks,
we will focus the balance of our efforts on enabling their interoperability in a
solutions network context.
We will initially focus on identification, collection, and analysis of the two end points,
these being the NWRs and water related DSTs. We will then develop strategies to connect
these two end points via innovative communication strategies, improved user access to
NASA resources, improved water cycle research community appreciation for DST requirements,
improved policymaker, management and stakeholder knowledge of NASA research and application
products, and improved identification of pathways for progress.
Finally, we will develop relevant benchmarking and metrics, to understand the network's
characteristics, to optimize its performance, and to establish sustainability.
The WaterNet will deliver numerous pre-evaluation reports that will identify the pathways
for improving the collective ability of the water cycle community to routinely harness
NWRs that address crosscutting water cycle challenges.
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