Hydro-Kansas Research Project: Multi-Scale Dynamical Understanding Of Statistical Scale Invariance In Floods And Riparian Evapotranspiration In River Networks
Gupta, Vijay 1
1 CEAE
Abstract The Hydro-Kansas (HK) is a multi-institutional, multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary research project. It represents the first illustrative example of a Natural Laboratory (NL), as described in the Water, Earth, Biota (WEB) report to the National Science Foundation (http://cires.colorado.edu/hydrology). HK combines theoretical analyses, numerical modeling, and an observational field program to understand and predict floods during periods of stationary and non-stationary changes in global hydro-climate. The framework is being generalized to include riparian evapotranspiration (RET). The central observational facility of HK is the 1,100 km2 Whitewater basin 50 km east of Wichita, Kansas. HK is addressing the long-standing problem of predicting spatial statistical scale invariance, or scaling, in floods and RET from bio-physical processes on multiple time scales that range from those of individual rainfall-runoff events to annual and longer. Physical predictions of statistical scaling involve non-linear interactions among hydrologic, geomorphologic, atmospheric, climatic, and ecologic processes in mesoscale basins. They require, (i) multi-scale dynamical formulations, (ii) a new ensemble approach to solve multi-scale dynamical equations on random self-similar (RSN) river networks, (iii) diagnostic analyses of theoretical predictions using observations, and (iv) a framework to generalize the results across global hydroclimates. Progress on these four sets of research challenges will be illustrated through examples.