Ted Engman

Why bother for 0.0001% of Earth's water? Challenges for soil moisture research

For each kilogram of water on Earth, only 1 mg is stored as soil moisture. Yet this miniscule amount of water exerts significant control over various hydrological, ecological, and meteorological processes ranging from boundary layer dynamics to the global water cycle. The 1993 Mississippi River flood illustrated the power of 0.0001% of Earths water to dictate the fate and evolution of regional weather and climate. The space-time distribution of soil moisture is a key component in describing transfer and distribution of mass and energy between the land and the atmosphere. It is a fundamental variable in biosphere-atmosphere transfer, biogeochemistry, ecosystem process, and rainfall-runoff models. There is a growing consensus that a unified approach is necessary to monitor, characterize, and model soil moisture over a range of scales, but such an approach has yet to be defined.

NASA's applied sciences for water resources.

The Earth Systems Division within NASA has the primary responsibility for the Earth Science Applied Science Program and the objective to accelerate the use of NASA science results in applications to help solve problems important to society and the economy. The primary goal of the Earth Science Applied Science Program is to improve future and current operational systems by infusing them with scientific knowledge of the Earth system gained through space-based observation, assimilation of new observations, and development and deployment of enabling technologies, systems, and capabilities. This paper discusses one of the major problems facing water resources managers, that of having timely and accurate data to drive their decision support tools. It then describes how NASA?s science and space based satellites may be used to overcome this problem. Opportunities for the water resources community to participate in NASA?s Water Resources Applications Program are described.

Opportunities for the Water Resources Community in NASA's Applied Sciences Program

The Earth Systems Division within NASA has the primary responsibility for the Earth Science Applied Science Program and the objective to accelerate the use of NASA science results in applications to help solve problems important to society and the economy. The primary goal of the Earth Science Applied Science Program is to improve future and current operational systems by infusing them with scientific knowledge of the Earth system gained through space-based observation, assimilation of new observations, and development and deployment of enabling technologies, systems, and capabilities. This paper describes the opportunities for the water resources community to participate in NASA’s Water Management Applications