Overall Comments of Laila Parker:
Hey John,
First of all, it’s quite exciting to read this, I can almost taste the future of hydrology, and it tastes
good!
Attached is a draft on which I made some basic grammatical edits. You use a number of
acronyms which are unclear to me, I inserted comments on all of them.
On a larger scale, I am contemplating the relative merits of putting the organizational structure of
the HMTF first, which would make the proposal a bit clearer, and also make all the goals seem
more plausible; versus keeping the original structure, which is probably a more enticing format –
eg provide exciting goals first, then the practical facts. I have to say that at points in the first third
of the proposal, I was really confused about how this would all work.
For instance, when the proposals come in to the NSF via the HMTF manager, I still don’t
see where the NSF draws the money to fund the instrumentation. Is that what this proposal is
asking for? Or is this a way to get more money, per individual proposal, from the NSF?
On that note, I really was unclear as to what this peer-reviewed proposal support meant
until the detailed explanation on page 5 – maybe an earlier brief explanation (a few words?) could
help.
Maybe you could include an example, at the very beginning of the meat of the proposal,
describing how a proposal would be dealt with, from NSF through implementation & review, in
very general terms. This would be similar to “The Life of a Proposal”, which you have at the end,
which in the beginning could provide a structure into which the more detailed explanations of the
processes could fit.
What percentage of instruments do you see being housed at the facility versus being
lended out? Will the instruments being lended go through the facility to get calibrated & repaired?
Maybe you’ll do this in the budget, but it would be nice to see a summation of the
director’s, etc, time, with specific tasks annotated to time blocks.
Laila
A Proposal for the Establishment of
Hydrologic Measurement Technology Support
John Selker, John Durant, Rosemary Knight, Breck Bowden, Jennifer Jacobs
With the
Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI)
Outline
Executive Summary
1. Introduction
1.1. Context
1.2. Scientific justification
2. Tasks in the Implementation of the HMTF
2.1. Support of Competitive Proposals
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2.2.
2.3.
2.4.
Support of Hydrologic Observatories
Training and Outreach
Continuous Improvement
3. Budget
4. Implementation plan
5.1 Timeline
5. Cited Literature
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Summary
Major advances in measurement technology, supported by satellite observations and
computing power, provide the opportunity to greatly increase our understanding of the
world’s hydrosphere in the coming decades. For these new discoveries to be realized, a
national-level investment in measurement infrastructure will be needed. This proposal
describes a pilot Hydrologic Measurement Technology Facility (HMTF) that will
catalyze hydrologic research by putting key measurement technologies and logistical
support in the field to support peer-reviewed researcher projects.
The facility operations are woven into the NSF peer-review process. The support of
projects by the HMTF will be approved by the Hydrologic Sciences panel during their
regular evaluation process. This approach is inspired by the approach of VECO. As the
HMTF is written into funded proposals, the HMTF will hire staff and purchase needed
equipment to respond to these needs.
Much of the instrumentation and assistance in using these instruments provided through
HMTF to the community will neither be purchased nor even touched by the HMTF: the
HMTF will facilitate an instrumentation marketplace, where people looking for particular
instruments are put in contact with those that have them. An example is the USGS
Hydrologic Instrumentation Facility (HIF), which will open its doors to CUAHSI
scientists through a HMTF portal. In addition, scientists with specialized skills and
equipment will be supported in providing these contributions to projects. The HMTF will
assist with establishment of rental rates and shipping logistics.
Beyond direct intervention in NSF-funded science, the HMTF sees opportunities for
support of hydrologic measurement through community service tasks. Support of an
instrumentation workshop and a continuing series of short-courses on specific critical
technologies will be coordinated. The short courses will be sponsored by the HMTF to
communicate new methods to the community, and will generally be presented
immediately before or after relevant major scientific meetings. In addition, the
development of a peer-reviewed on-line “Encyclopedia of Methods in Hydrologic
Measurement” will be shepherded through assignment of an editorial board. The HMTF
will build upon the USGS Techniques of Water Resources Investigations series to build a
comprehensive citable collection of methods employed by current researchers, invaluable
for both educational and scientific applications.
This proposal describes an orderly, demand driven start up of this facility. The initial
pilot institution for the HMFT will be Oregon State University. A Facilities Advisory
Panel (FAP) will be established to provide external scientific guidance for the HMTF,
and annual review of HMTF performance.
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1. Introduction
1.1 Context
Water and its abundance, availability, quality, and predictability are imperative natural
resource issues. Population pressures and global changes over the next decades will
increase focus and concern over diminishing stocks of useable water and increasingly
uncertain water supply, as well as the frequency of extreme hydrologic events (i.e., floods
and droughts), and risk of exposure to water-borne contaminants, pollutants, and disease.
These trends result from greater human pressures on available water supplies and
delivery systems, changing patterns of land use and development, and the prospect of a
rapidly changing and increasingly variable climate. In this environment, evaluating
tradeoffs between competing uses and claims for water are likely to pose significant
challenges for water management and policy, requiring sound scientific information and
understanding. The ability to predict the effects of global change on the hydrologic
regimes across the earth is requisite to the orderly development of society.
In spite of the growing societal need for water, the science of water—hydrology and
related fields—has lagged behind in its ability to provide critical information and to
predict the consequences and impacts of hydrologic events. For example, we cannot
predict the timing of landslides, the heights of floodwaters during major floods, the fates
of contaminants released into surface or subsurface waters, or the magnitude or duration
of regional droughts with the accuracy necessary for effective countermeasures for public
safety and health. These are the aspects that make it to the local newsroom; at scientific
meetings across the globe it is further recognized that the needs and opportunities have
grown exponentially over the past decades, and the present strategy of response is not
adequate to meet this challenge.
Improving our predictive capacity in hydrology will require a fundamental transformation
and upgrading of the ways we conduct hydrologic science, including facilities, training,
observational networks, data and information systems, education, and outreach. This is
the overall work of CUAHSI. This document presents CUAHSI’s proposal for
transforming the technological infrastructure for hydrologic sciences by initiating a
national Hydrologic Measurement Technology Facility (HMTF). We present the
scientific justification for new infrastructure, outline the goals and objectives of the
facility, envision how such a facility would operate, and consider an implementation and
funding strategy.
1.2 Scientific Justification
Hydrology encompasses a wide range of sub-disciplines, including surface and
subsurface physical hydrology, biogeochemistry, hydrometerology, geomorphology, and
ecohydrology, and includes observations, models and experiments over scales ranging
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from dynamics of aerosols and individual raindrops to global water cycles and fluxes.
Fundamental scientific problems confronting modern hydrology include
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developing full accounting of water budgets over continents and oceans;
characterizing trends and variability of hydrologic processes under past, present,
and potential future climates;
predicting regional patterns, causes, and magnitudes of floods, droughts, and
other extreme hydrologic phenomena;
quantifying rates of movement of water, sediment, solutes, and contaminants in
surface and subsurface waters;
coupling carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles; and
exploring linkages among the hydrosphere, geosphere, and ecosphere over a
wide range of spatial and temporal scales.
To make progress towards solving these problems, accurate measurements must be taken
at all scales, from soil pores up to watersheds, as part of intensive field campaigns.
Fortunately, there has been an explosion of new technology in the last decade, from new
satellites for remote sensing of water, snow, and climatic trends to digital groundpenetrating radar for observing movement of water through the soil and geologic mantle.
At present, few hydrologists have access to costly instruments that measure physical,
chemical, and biological properties of interest in the field at any scale, or trace movement
of water and its fellow biochemical wanderers. Existing equipment is often prohibitively
expensive, prohibitively complex in setup and operation, and requires high levels of
expertise to obtain valid data. Although some researchers at national laboratories and
faculty at certain universities are able to use limited sets of instruments, it is essentially
unheard of to have access to the suites of equipment, required in parallel, necessary for
critical measurements. The time, expertise, and support needed to design new
instrumentation is likewise far beyond the scope of the individual hydrologist. Even were
researchers able to access and employ instruments in the field, there is also no standard
for data transfer and access by the broad community, with the result that many
measurements see limited use. The HTMF will provide the infrastructure to bring
contemporary tools to scientists engaged in hydrologic discovery.
The HMTF will consist of the following components:
a. Peer-selected support of competitive proposals through provision of state-of-the-art
instrument, measurement systems, and expertise as required to obtain critical data for the
elucidation of hydrological processes;
b. Support of the CUAHSI Long Term Hydrologic Observatories from development to
operations;
c. Training and outreach to improve the understanding and application of contemporary
instrumentation.
d. A laboratory for the adaptation and development of instrumentations required to allow
scientific discovery in hydrology.
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2. Implementation of the Hydrologic HMTF
2.1 Support of Competitive Proposals
The operational model for support of PI instrumentation requirements of the CUASHI
Hydrological Measurements Technical Facility (HMTF, Fig xx) is ‘demand-driven’ in that it is
directly responsive to the needs of the investigator community. This procedure is inspired by the
very successful model of arctic infrastructure support provided by VECO
(http://www.vecopolar.com/). Investigators prepare and submit proposals to the NSF as they
currently do. Where investigators propose to use specialized equipment or mount significant field
campaigns, the need and rationale for these approaches is explained in the proposal narrative, as
usual. However, in preparing their budgets and budget justifications, investigators focus
primarily on the direct and indirect costs of doing the research and do not quantify the equipment
or logistic costs. Rather, the need for specialized equipment and logistics support is explained
and justified in special section of the budget justification set aside for this purpose. The initial
role of the HMTF is to prepare feasibility assessments and costing estimates for the proposed
activities.
The procedure by which the HMTF enters the project proposal process is triggered with
the submission of a proposal to the NSF. The HMTF director will be an ex officio member of the
NSF program review panel and will have access to proposals in the Fastlane database for those
proposals which include requests for HMTF support. It will be the HMTF Director’s
responsibility to scan incoming proposals and extract the pertinent information from the
paragraphs requesting support for special equipment and logistics. The HMTF Director will
assess the feasibility (e.g., can the measurements be made?) and will provide a “preliminary
quotation” of the cost of the proposed equipment and logistics needs and will assess the technical
support required to deliver these needs. The quotation will be guaranteed by the HMTF to be
within +/-50% of the final assessment, but not a firm bid, given the lack of communication with
the proposing authors at this stage of the process. These assessments will be done on the basis for
the resources already within the HMTF’s capacity or that could reasonably be developed to
expand the HTMF’s capacity. These assessments will be done independently of the assessments
of scientific merit that are completed by the mail-out and panel reviews conducted by the NSF
Program Manager. The feasibility and cost information provided by the HMTF Director will
serve as ancillary input to the pre-award evaluation process.
Once the NSF Program Manager acts on the recommendations of the program Review
Panel, notification of successful awards will be sent simultaneously to the investigators and to the
HMTF Director. The director will then develop a firm project price for the project in consultation
with the proposal author. Ultimately the award will consist of two parts: one part that supports
the direct and indirect costs requested by the investigators and a second part that supports the
HMTF to provide the technical and logistic services required by the investigators. At this point
the HMTF and the investigators will begin a planning dialogue. The HMTF Director will be
responsible for assembling a team from resources within the HMTF or contracted by the HMTF
to support the investigators’ technical needs.
For each successful project there will be a Technical Support Team (TST) developed by
the HMTF Director. The TST will work directly with the investigators’ team to plan, deploy,
execute, and analyze the field research, as appropriate to the project. In some cases it may only
be necessary for the TST to provide some instruction and advice. In other cases, the TST may
become an essential component of the investigators’ team, working with them directly in the
field, and assisting with major components of the data analysis. In some cases, the TST may
fabricate custom-built equipment and facilities. In cases where TST members are substantially
involved in the intellectual development of the project, questions of ‘acknowledgement’ versus
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‘co-authorship’ status should be discussed at the very beginning of the investigator/TST
relationship.
When a project has been completed, there will be a performance appraisal by the project
PI and by the HMTF steering committee which will help the HMTF adapt the future project
needs. In the normal course of project management, the project investigators report to NSF on
the progress and ultimately the findings of the project. For projects in which HMTF assistance
has been utilized, the investigators will provide a special evaluation of the HMTF input. The
NSF Program Manager will use material from the project final report and from the Investigator
performance appraisal to provide a performance appraisal to the HMTF Director. This
information will be used to inform the first-cut feasibility and costing process for new projects
and to help direct the HMTF capacity building strategies.
Staff Requirements of Task 2.1:
Director:
Review of proposals to assess feasibility: 10 days each 6 month cycle
Preparation of estimated budgets for proposed activities: 25 days/cycle
Preparation of final bids and TST for proposed activities: 50 days/cycle
LTHO Staff: 25 days per year in support proposal evaluation and cost-estimation
TST: Assigned and budgeted per project. It is expected that the director and the
technical director will contribute 20 and 50 days respectively to this
activity funded from the HMTF core budget.
2.2 Support of Long Term Hydrologic Observatories (LTHOs)
CUAHSI and the NSF have expressed a commitment to establish long-term observation
of hydrologic processes at multiple scales at approximately five LTHOs. In XXXX
CUAHSI will fund the parallel development of 10 candidate basin proposals, of which
one or two are expected to go to the NSF for competitive funding of an LTHO. Each
observatory will span approximately 10,000 square kilometers, with instrumentation
installed to monitor all the major fluxes across hydrologic interfaces (see
www.GODONLYKNOWS.CUAHSI.ORG). The establishment of these observatories
will require accurate and consistent site characterization, and installation of reliable
calibrated instrumentation at the highest density ever attempted. Although each LTHO
will be contracted through a collection of universities, the HMTF will provide the
expertise required to select robust and compatible instrumentation across the LTHO
system. It is expected that the LTHO-related activities will be more than half of the
work-load of the HMTF in the first 5 years of operation. Support will include
supervision of geophysical characterization, specification of installed equipment,
calibrating and testing the instruments deployed at the LTHOs, technical evaluation and
testing of upgrades and new developments, and troubleshooting malfunctioning
instruments.
We fully expect that instrument development will be an important activity of the HTMF,
both to facilitate the success of the LTHO’s and to accelerate the progress of discovery in
the general hydrologic community. HMTF will improve the instrument development
capabilities as directed by the FAP’s assessment of demand for these services, which
would be built up incrementally through supplemental funding requests to the NSF.
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The list of typical requirements for supporting LTHO activities, shown below,
demonstrates that these efforts will involve extensive use of state-of-the-art tools and
analysis techniques that go far beyond simple installation of off-the-shelf parts.
1. Provide high resolution DEMs and canopy cover profiles (airborne
LIDAR provided by NCALM);
2. Install high-resolution precipitation monitoring system (ground-based
radar and disdrometer network);
3. Characterize and monitor stream network:
i. Hyporheic through tracer transport (one-time study)
ii. Temperature monitoring along reaches (continuous in time)
iii. Major ion monitoring (continuous in time)
iv. Stream bed temperature profiles (full year study)
v. Gaging of flow (permanent installation)
vi. Sediment monitoring (continuous monitoring)
4. Characterize and monitor aquifers
i. Depth to water and fluctuation in water level
ii. Permeability profile
iii. Major ionic composition
iv. Biogeochemistry
5. Geological characterization: geophysics.
6. ET monitoring (e.g., micrometeorological tools, LIDAR, scintilometer)
7. Vadose uptake (infiltration capacity) and fluctuation and spatial
distribution of vadose storage (e.g., TDR network, instruments for vadose
hydrogeologic characterization).
The HMTF initially have one PhD level scientist hired to focus on support of the LTHO
effort who will complement the skills of the Director. This staffer will later be
complemented by additional staff as the LTHO process adds demand (and associated
budget) for these services. These staff will aggressively seek out all instruments that are
presently available for lease, and establish contracts for their use. Those critical
measurements which can not be accomplished in this manner will be brought to the FAP,
and if deemed necessary, will be requested of the NSF through supplemental funding
requests.
Staff Requirements of Task 2.2:
Director: 30 days per year in coordination and technical consulting.
LTHO Staffer: 125 days per year (including travel).
2.3.
Training and Outreach
The HMTF is needed to rectify present obstacles in hydrologic measurement. While
provision of hardware is critical, several non-material aspects are also critical to be
addressed. For instance, the community will not even start to take advantage of the
HMTF if it is unaware of the process by which the services can be obtained.
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Furthermore, there is a lack of community standards for measurement, undermining the
entire endeavor. To address these issues we propose a Training and Outreach program
for the community of scientists making hydrologic measurements.
Sub Tasks
To help fill these needs, three sub-tasks are proposed.
1. Hold a hydrologic science instrumentation workshop that also introduces the
HMTF capabilities and process of gaining access to the facilities;
2. Coordinate a program of short-courses to provide training in using hydrologic
measurements equipment;
3. Develop a web-based encyclopedic peer-reviewed compendium of hydrologic
science field techniques.
Task 1. Hydrologic Science Instrumentation Workshop
As part of the initiation of the HMTF, a one-time workshop will be conducted. The goals
are: 1) to inform the broader community of HMTF services and how the HMTF will
interact with NSF proposals and PIs – from the pre-proposal phase to project completion;
2) to provide a venue for interaction between scientists developing instrumentation,
vendors, and equipment users, and 3) to provide the opportunity for hands-on
demonstrations and booth space for exhibitors. The workshop will be held in October of
2004 so that PI’s might have an opportunity to prepare proposals with HMTF
components for the December NSF Hydrology panel. It is proposed that the workshop be
held in New Orleans so that it could include a visit to the USGS HIF.
Planning for the workshop will commence in earnest as soon as NSF notifies the
Committee that the proposal has been funded. The Committee will work together to plan
and run the workshop.
Sub-task 2.3.1 resources requirements:
Director: 3 weeks
Tech Staff: 3 weeks
Administrative assistant: 8 weeks
Advertising, site costs and travel: $30,000
Task 2. Hydrologic Instrumentation Training Sessions
Formal training opportunities will be organized where experts in particular technologies
will present the state of the art in measurement tools and techniques. The HMTF will
coordinate course site arrangements, evalution and quality improvement; and cover costs
to put on the courses. A solicitation will be announced in August of 2004 requesting
experts to prepare mini-proposals for short-course topics. Five topics will be selected to
be presented in 2005 (distributed wireless systems; geophysics for hydrologists;
precipitation measurement; Measurement of Evapotranspiration; and Soil Moisture
measurement), each of which will be given a budget to cover preparation of materials,
instructor travel and expenses, and site costs. Courses may include existing USGS field
methods courses; hydrologic field camps (e.g. a course on stream tracer hydrology at the
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HJ Andrews experimental forest); or developing training classes on particular
technologies (e.g., wireless networked sensing).
Sub-task 2.3.2 major resources requirements:
Director: 3 weeks
Administrative assistant: 8 weeks
Advertising, site costs and travel: $10,000 per training: $50,000
Task 3. Encyclopedia of Hydrologic Science Field Techniques.
No central reference exists for standard methods or even advice on alternate approaches
for hydrologic science. Perhaps the most widely recognized and accessible resource, the
USGS’s Techniques of Water Resources Investigations database, provides some
information, but much of this is either dated or highly specialized. Similarly, standard
methods exist in some cases – e.g., through ASTM and APHA – however, these tend to
be highly discipline-specific. The HMTF will coordinate the development of an on-line,
full-text-searchable peer-reviewed comprehensive reference for hydrologic measurement.
The PI’s of this grant will work with the HMTF director to select an editor and fourperson associate editorial committee for the project. The associate editors will broadly
represent the following areas of hydrologic measurement: subsurface; surface water;
atmospheric; and water quality. The process will be run much like a peer-reviewed
journal. The editors will solicit contributions and the chief editor will assign submitted
work to the associate editors for full peer review. Each accepted article will be assigned
a publication identifier, and be a citable reference. As methods evolve, the previous
versions of methods will be maintained in archive so that work based on these methods
can be reproduced. An additional section of the encyclopedia will be an “Emerging
Methods” category where contributors will be able to post ideas and preliminary results.
These contributions will be identified as exploratory, and will only require authorization
of the editor to be posted. Emerging methods will be cataloged along with the peerreviewed approaches, providing a venue for collaborative development of new methods.
The encyclopedia will be web-based with all methods freely downloadable.
Sub-task 2.3.3 major resources requirements:
Director: 2 weeks/yr
Administrative assistant: 10 weeks/yr
Editor: $10,000/yr for 0.10 FTE compensation and $2,500/yr travel
Associate Editors: 4x $1,500/yr for annual editorial committee meetings.
Computing and internet support: $10,000/yr
3. The Structure of the HMTF
3.1 Single Site Center of Operations
The HMTF instruments and staff will be housed at a single site to avoid redundancy in
tools stored in various smaller facilities, provide a critical mass of expertise and staffing
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to solve complex measurement problems, and provide a focus for the hydrologic
community for technology and related training.
3.2 Provision of Instruments
Instrument provision will be achieved in the most cost effective manner possible,
leveraging existing infrastructure using approaches that are novel and community
building.
3.2.1. Brokerage Services
a. Formal leasing services. HMTF will negotiate to open existing agency
instrument pools (such as the USGS Hydrologic Instrumentation Facility, AKA,
HIF) to the university research community. HMTF will resolve legal matters, set
up web portals or other facilities to allow rental agreements to be made, but
financial liability will be between the lessor and lessee.
b. Peer-to-peer leasing. HMTF will facilitate equipment sharing that would benefit
the owner by providing revenue and would benefit the lessee by gaining access to
equipment at lower cost than purchasing. HMTF will facilitate through minigrants to provide funds for packing crates and may indemnify lessee from
breakage (by developing a repair fund from equipment rentals, for example).
Accepting such financial liabilities may be critical to successful operation of such
a service. Legal and logistical aspects will be the responsibility of the HMTF
director.
c. Hydrologic Science Marketplace. HMTF will develop a web site for posting of
services and equipments offered by both commercial vendors and by individuals.
This would provide a marketing strategy for individuals offering analytical
services, for example, that currently have no easy way to make their presence
known to potential clients. This service should certainly be free to member
universities, probably should be free to any university or non-profit, and may
initially be free to for-profit commercial vendors. We may be able to charge
commercial vendors an advertising fee if this experiment is successful.
d. “Science Pairing.” Coordinated with the emerging techniques component of the
encyclopedia, the HMTF will develop a matching service to link those who are
developing instrumentation and/or field techniques with those who need such
instrumentation and techniques. We envision a web-based bulletin board
framework where interested groups maintain FAQ’s and respond to inquiries. A
prime example of the need for this is in shallow geophysics, which has not made
the in-roads into hydrology that it might have because of lack of information
sharing between the geophysics and geohydrology communities.
3.2.2. Major Instrumentation and Field Support.
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This service has been the primary motivation behind the HMTF since the inception of the
concept. The decision on which capabilities will be adopted as HMTF-operated
instruments will be made through the peer review process as proposals are evaluated and
funded in the NSF, with additional pro-active recommendations for investments coming
from the Facilities Advisory Panel (FAP). In this proposal we request no funds to
purchase equipment. These instruments will come to the HMTF through two processes:
1) NSF funded proposals that require the HMTF to purchase equipment; and 2) HMTF
proposals directed to the NSF which arise from FAP identified resources that have been
determined to be needed by the community. This pool of instruments will grow naturally
over the operations of the facility. These instruments will be provided to scientists
through the usual NSF panel process, and, on an as-available basis, through miniproposals directly to the HMTF.
3.4
Staff support
Ultimately we believe that each major focus area (e.g., surface, subsurface and landatmosphere) will require technical support to direct instrument development and quality
assurance, hardware and software engineering support, for maintenance and
development. A visiting scientist program is envisioned which will provide for bidirectional communication with the larger community. These human resources will be
critical to the long-term success of the HMTF providing specialized skills for shortduration campaigns. This initial proposal is directed to establishment of a bare-bones
staff, with the expectation that this staff will grow in time through supplemental
proposals to the NSF as directed by the FAP based on documented user demand. In this
context, the HMTF staff will consist of: 1) the director (PhD-level); 2) the LTHO support
coordinator (PhD-level); and 3) an administrative assistant with web experience (B.S.level).
3.4
Offices, laboratory and development facilities
The HMTF must have the ability to modify, test, and calibrate the complete range of
hydrologic tools. Oregon State University has committed to provision of most of the
space in a free-standing campus building for these purposes. This building currently
houses a precision machine shop as well as offices, and a large wet-dry laboratory. The
machine facility includes a full complement of machine tools, welding equipment, and a
high bay for assembly and receiving. In the same building there is a video-conferencing
room (Polycom 9000i), 800 square feet of office space for staff, and 1,500 square feet of
wet lab/electronics lab space. An equipment storage space is located in the same
building.
3.5 Data handling – information systems
HMTF will develop an archive of all the data collected through the use of HMTF
platforms or data-collection systems using standards and protocols developed jointly with
the currently funded CUAHSI Hydrologic Information Systems program.
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3.6 Staff, Postdoctoral, and Visiting Scientist Structure
Ultimately, the HMTF will provide a venue for Postdoctoral/Visiting Scientists to allow
for brief visits and sabbatical assistance to help in the development specific instrument
packages and associated software support (e.g. inverse methods). These “visitors” fulfill
three critical functions. First, they bring current needs to the facility, presenting the staff
with cutting edge issues for instrumentation and measurement systems. Second, they
bring new ideas and techniques being developed in universities to a fully equipped
technical staff prepared to transform these ideas into tools. Finally, these visitors will
take home the seeds of new ideas and tools from which the techniques developed at the
HMTF will take root in the larger scientific community. This program will be added to
the HMTF through request for supplemental funds when the FAP deems the facility has
matured to the point where visiting scientists could be integrated into the HMTF mission.
4. Continuous Improvement
Jennifer – keep or ditch as you see fit!
4.1 Quality Assurance
The objective of the HMTF data quality assurance program is to ensure that each data
point collected is completely defined, including the uncertainty, following the motto “If it
is not documented it didn’t happen.” All instruments provided by the HMTF will be
calibrated to traceable standards and have well defined precision and accuracy. As part
of its technology development program, and directed by the user community, the HMTF
will continually strive to improve the performance of existing instruments as well as
develop instruments with higher standards. In conjunction with Hydrology Information
Systems the HMTF will establish standardized data formats, and standards for data
reporting that will ensure that the data is properly documented and that all data is readily
accessible including calibration data. Finally the HMTF will provide training and field
support to the users in order to ensure that all systems are properly installed and operated.
4.2 The Life of a Project
To obtain the best results possible the HMTF will expect to be involved through the
entire life of each project it contributes to. The process will begin with the PI submitting
a science objectives proposal for peer review. Science objectives proposals that are
approved will then go into the design phase. The HMTF staff, in conjunction with the PI,
will evaluate what suite of instruments is appropriate and available to meet the science
objectives, and will generate a detailed project proposal which will include a schedule,
types and numbers of instruments, documentation requirements and staffing. The HMTF
will work from the test plan to assemble, calibrate and test the necessary equipment. The
HMTF will work with the PI to provide necessary training and support for the installation
and operation of the project. Data collected from the project will be assembled by the PI
and submitted to the HMTF for quality checking before being submitted to the HIS for
archiving and distribution.
4.3 Performance Assessment
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The HMTF will continually strive to improve its performance. This goal will be
achieved through objective evaluation of that performance from both inside and outside
the facility. The ultimate measure of the success of the HMTF will be the evaluation of
the users and the general hydrology community. Users will be asked to submit two levels
of evaluation. The first level will be simple recommendations to be used by the HMTF to
improve its performance. The second level will be a scored evaluation of all aspects of
the HMTF performance and will be submitted directly to the FAP. The FAP will also
solicit comments from the general hydrology community before each of its meetings.
Additional quantitative measures might include percent of data return, volume of qualitychecked data archived, the time required to put an experiment in the field, and the inhouse turn around time of instruments. The evaluation process must be flexible enough
so that it can evolve to provide the information necessary for the HMTF to improve.
5. Budget
6. Implementation Plan
6.1 Start Up
The start up phase of the HMTF is critical, and has been considered with care to assure an
efficient, feasible, and effective organization at all stages of development. Hiring the
director will be the first task of the PI’s of this grant, in collaboration with the leadership
of CUAHSI. The director will then immediately proceed to hire the LTHO staffer and
administrative assistant.
6.2 Governance
The HMTF will be governed based on the principles of open peer-reviewed access to
resources. To achieve this end the HMTF will have, in addition to an accountable
internal management structure, an external advisory committee that controls access to
HMTF resources for all major material commitments. Below is discussed the structure of
the HMTF governance as well as the processes of proposal submission and evaluation
Day to day operations of the HMTF will be under the control of the HMTF Director.
Specific facility use requests will be considered twice a year by the five-member
Facilities Advisory Panel (FAP). The FAP will be responsible for annual external review
of the HMTF operations, and will determine the need for supplemental funds and
capabilities of the HMTF as it develops. The 3-year term panel members of the FAP will
be composed of scientists with broad-based experience in observational studies of
hydrologic sciences, covering areas of groundwater, surface water, atmospheric
processes, and biogeochemistry. FAP members are nominated by the CUAHSI
membership and selected by the CUAHSI board of directors.
Draft – not for general distribution
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