Focus Areas:
- Earth Systems
The goal of this project 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. WaterNet is initially focusing on identification, collection, and analysis of two end points: (1) the user requirements of community-of-practice organizations involved with the water cycle and (2) the NASA water cycle research results. The primary WaterNet focus will be interaction with groups having national or broad application of water cycle data. Several WaterNet demonstration projects involve developmental refinement for real-time forecasting of flood or drought situations. The MIT Integrated Global System Model (IGSM) provides another type of forecasting and the opportunity and platform to quantify the benefits (including economic) offered by deploying a particular new water cycle satellite configuration (such as the Water Elevation Recovery Mission). It also enables us to quantify the benefits (including economic) by retrieving additional data, such as additional soil moisture data or freeze-thaw data and improving our understanding of the global system, as depicted both in the global climate system component of IGSM, as well as the economic value-addition of such an augmented information availability.