 Welcome, everybody. That's great to see. Most everybody made it here despite storms and some rather impressive circling of the Midwest. If you want to hear Dave Wagner's story over dinner, that one is worth retelling. Anyway, thank you. We have a really exciting full day. We're going to learn a lot today. We're going to listen. We're going to hear from those on the ground taking science and using it. It's going to be extremely informative. I don't want to spend any more time than necessary on preliminaries. So we'll go around the room and do an introduction. Just name and where you're from. Do we need anything more than that? So we'll do the room first and then go around on the phone. I'll start and then we can go this way. Does it matter? So welcome again. I'm Kathy Kling from Cornell University and I chair the Water Science and Technology Board. Yeah, we do. Thank you. We need to use these doohickeys. John Arthur, Florida Geological Survey, WSTB. Tom Grasiano, NOAA. I'm Marquess Roy. I am a retired I'm a member of the Water Science Technology Board. Stephanie Johnson with the WSTB staff. Dave Duzanback, Carnegie Mellon University. I'm a member of the WSTB. Max Gomberg, California's Water Resources Control Board. Should I do it again? Okay. John Dipnick, Texas Water Development Board. Suzanne Dorsey, Maryland Department of the Environment. Laura Ailers, I'm a senior staff officer with the Water Science and Technology Board. Carl Rockney, National Science Foundation. Ken Bellots, US Geological Survey. Kay Whitlock, Christopher Burke, Engineering, Chicago. Nisha Jami, Stanford University. I'm a member of the WSTB. Jay Family, at the University of Saskatchewan. Dave Wagner, this is not contagious what I have. It's a result of doing a stupid run last week at 10,000 feet in the Rockies and realizing I'm not as young as I used to be. Water Science Technology Board. Retired part-time work with Wolf Engineering. Sandy Ebert, with the US Geological Survey. Doug Wixen, National Academy staff. Richard Ortt, Maryland Geological Survey. Andy Staley, Maryland Geological Survey. Bill Cunningham, USGS. Josh Sheody, with the Pacific Northwest National Lab. Michael Zwerham, with Resources for the Future. Adam Benavides, with the US Army Coral Engineers. Bob Ashton, EPA, Office of Water. Jeanne Aquilino, WSTB staff. Courtney DeVane, WSTB staff. Brendan, with WSTB staff. Abigail Ullman, DCST staff. Steve by American Water Works Association. And Jeff Lape, with EPA's Office of Water. We are joined by seven seven folks on the phone. So if each of you could jump in and say your name and where you are. And I know when I believe Wendy's on. Yes, I'm here. Why don't you start us off, Wendy? Okay, Wendy Graham, I'm with you in spirit, stuck in Charlotte and rerouted home. I'm with the Water Science and Technology Board. Others, please just chime in. Chio Sham, with Eastern Research Group. Bill Workhizer, Department of Interior. Thank you. Jeff Pomley, USGS. Lauren Schrupp. Any others? This is Jennifer Origo from the US Global Change Research Program. Great. Welcome. Kathy, one more thing. I know Tom Fraser is trying to join as well before 1030. Thank you, Wendy. We'll keep a look out for that. Excellent. Well, we're sorry you didn't make it, but super happy you're home safe and can join us by phone. That's more important than anything. Okay. Are there any other preliminaries we need to do? So I think we should just dive right in. We are going to push the first session to instead of stopping at 1030, more like 1045 to account for the fact that we always have this sort of startup intro time. So we'll do about 25 minutes for the presentations. We'll take a few questions after the first presentation and then do the second one and have questions for that and then any general conversation until 1045. So with that, welcome to Tom Graziano. I'd prefer to let everybody just do any more introductions they want than that. Okay. Great. Is this on? Can you hear me? It's on? Great. Okay. First of all, thanks, Kathy, Elizabeth, Water Science Technology Board members, guests, the staff. Thanks for the opportunity here to represent NOAA and speak on NOAA's behalf. Tell you a little bit about what we're doing in NOAA to transform our water prediction capabilities. I am the director of the Office of Water Prediction within the National Weather Service and one of the assets we have folks distributed in three geographic locations, one of which is the new National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which I'll talk about in a bit. And I'm also the chair of what's called the NOAA's Water Team. So it's a team that basically represents water interests across the whole of NOAA and I'm responsible for coordinating activities across NOAA related to water. Okay. Just to provide a little context, I'll talk a little bit about strategic vision for the Weather Service. We just came out with a new strategic plan and I'll just focus on the water element. I'll talk a little bit about the National Water Center and how it's serving as a catalyst to help us transform our water prediction capabilities within NOAA and with the broader water enterprise. Key partnerships are absolutely necessary to make that happen. Talk about the National Water Model, which is a new modeling capability that we brought online on the 16th of August 2016. I'll talk a little bit about another capability we have with four water resource applications called the Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service and then I'll briefly summarize. And if you could, somebody could give me like a five minute warning. I'll know when to get into super caffeinated mode here to make sure I get through this. All right. Thank you. All right. So first of all, the Weather Service mission is to we produce for climate weather, water forecast and warnings for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the national economy. That is our mission. And our strategic plan, which just came out about a month ago, from a water perspective, there are four primary foci here. One is delivering actual water resources information to meet from national to street level across all timescales. Bottom line is over the course of the last eight or nine years, we've gone out via many fora and interacted with all manner of stakeholders within the water resources enterprise. And basically asked folks, essentially what keeps them up at night? What are the decisions that they make for which they have insufficient information? And when we took all that information, we integrated and we distilled it. There were five essentially five themes that emerged and five areas of prominent concern. And they are flood, drought, water quality, water availability, and then climate change, it's really sort of cuts across all of them. And one of the things that surprised me in this process of interacting with all these stakeholders is the desire of the stakeholders in large part for information, which is a much higher fidelity both in space and time than we currently provide. Those of you that are familiar with the what the Weather Service does now is we provide on a daily basis forecast and more frequent in a flooding situation, but essentially daily forecast at about 3500 of the 8200 30 forecast at 3500 locations and those are 30, 3500 of the 8200 USGS dream gauge locations, essentially. So it is a manually intensive process. It's a lump parameterized model, the Sacramento model, the forecasters in the loop. And so it's what we're looking at what we're doing now is expanding for the first time. Our first foray into high performance computing is the national water model, which I'll talk about here in a minute. And that really takes us down to the street level, you know, you know, instead of providing a forecast at 3500 locations on a daily basis, we're providing forecasts now on an hourly basis for 2.7 million locations. So okay, so additionally providing minutes to months river forecast, which quantify both atmospheric and hydrologic uncertainty, improving our forecasts of total water in the coastal zone, we've got about 120 million people in this country that live in the coastal zone. And when we make forecasts in the coastal zone right now, we don't have an integration between our terrestrial modeling and our coastal ocean modeling. And what we're doing with our sister agency, the National Ocean Service and also in partnership with with the USGS and with the Corps of Engineers, we are developing a capability now an operational capability to couple in routinely our freshwater and brackish forecast to get a total water prediction in the coastal zone. And obviously, this is not just important in situations where you've got landfalling tropical storms, where you have a large inland freshwater contribution to that that inundation in the coastal zone, but it's important on a routine basis. And what we're basically starting out with with a 2D application, we're going to be coupling to ADCIRC, and then moving beyond that in years to come with the 3D 3D model to make sure that we've got, you know, vertical profiles, temperature, salinity, to make sure that, you know, that forecast is as accurate as it is, it certainly as it can be. And then finally here delivering forecasts of flood inundation linked with other geospatial information are really making information actionable, particularly for the emergency management community. This is a requirement that has been out there for over 20 years, where emergency managers basically say we need information at the street level. We need to know where there's where the water is going to be when it's going to be how when it's going to be there, how deep it's going to be so they can preposition people and resources to most effectively mitigate the impacts of flooding. And I'll show some examples of that. So for those of you who aren't familiar with the National Water Center, we are on the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. This is our facility here. It's Tuscan Roman architecture for those of you who've been on the campus. We actually it's an interesting facility. It's 65,000 square feet. It's a lead gold facility. We were given a triangular plot of land. So we have a triangular shaped building. And in the center there, you can barely see the top of our dome, but was basically modeled after the Pantheon of Rome. And obviously it's not an open air oculus here, but it's basically modeled after that. And that's sort of the center or meeting point for the facility. And within this facility, we have an operation center, which we're in the process now of spinning up. And here's a here's a picture here. I'm going to use the laser pointer of our operation center. This was for our spring flood outlook. And the third Thursday and in March and March of every year we we get together. We had NOAA and other federal agencies. We have a spring outlook in the last few years. We've been doing it from the Water Center in Tuscaloosa. And this year we had a lot of interest from the media given there was a lot of flooding ongoing at the time and there still is. And we've been in flood, as you know, on the Mississippi River since January. And so this just gives you a glimpse into our little TV studio here in the back of the room. And then the screen there in the front is the this is our front screen here. And then there's room for about 28 people seats for about 28 people in the facility. We have gotten a congressional mandate to get operational by the 1st of October. So we've been I'll call it quasi operational. We're doing everything we can with the staff that we have on a routine basis to provide support to our field offices and work with other partners. But our first 12 folks will be bonafide IOC on the 1st of October with our first 12 folks. And then we consider full operating capability with a staff of 48. So we can support a 24 by seven operation. So that's that would be our next step over the course of the next few years. And we'll be inviting other federal water agencies to take residents in the facility at any time to support, you know, water prediction development, development of water prediction capabilities, but in particular in the operation center. And I know there's been a particular interest by FEMA of late to put a couple of liaisons in our facility. So we're looking forward to making that happen. But we've been under a fair amount of political pressure to do that. We've been somewhat resistant. We basically said, let us get our skin in the game first. And you know, and once we get the IOC, I assume I look at it as we've got skin in the game. So we'll certainly be looking to ramp up fairly quickly from there. But it's a center of excellence for water resources, science and prediction. It's a catalyst, you know, really to transform water prediction through enterprise collaboration. We've had over 80 scientific meetings there in the past few years. We cut the ribbon on the facility on the 26th of May 2015. And we've had over 80 scientific meetings with over 3000 participants since then. So it's gotten a lot of use. We only the capacity of the facility is for 200 plus people. We have essentially 72 of our Office of Water Prediction folks down there, which is the majority of the people in the Office of Water Prediction. We're only about 120 strong. And but we're as as folks as folks leave federal service or those that are interested in moving down there, we're moving. We're on a path to move everybody down there. So we have more than just critical mass, but you know, the entirety of our WP staff down in Tuscaloosa. OK. In terms of key partnerships, and this is absolutely critical for us moving forward. One of our partnerships I like to highlight is the Iris partnership among the GS Core, NOAA and FEMA back in the, you know, 2008 2009 time frame. There was a and the meetings among our federal water agencies. There was a, you know, general recognition that, you know, the nation's water resources challenges are growing. They're becoming increasingly complex, they're multidisciplinary in nature. And more important, they were bigger than any one agency. So we really needed to work together to try to solve, you know, the problems that we faced. We work together on a routine basis for those of you that aren't familiar with that, you know, that the GS has the observational infrastructure. They bring a lot of science to bear. They, you know, provide us with all the rating curves for the, you know, relating flow to stage at our forecast locations. The core obviously does the water management along with the Bureau of Wreck. And then our swim lane, if you will, is prediction. We were responsible for generating and issuing both forecasts and warnings. And then FEMA's got the response and mitigation piece. And clearly, you know, as we talk about the enterprise, the additional key relationship is with the academic and research community. Certainly here we're at the National Academy of Sciences today. We've been working with Elizabeth now for a few years in earnest. We have a relationship with the National Science Foundation in Kwasi. And for those, I think many of you are probably familiar with Kwasi, but it's a consortium of universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences Incorporated. And what's important about that relationship with NSF in Kwasi is ever since we cut the ribbon on the water center on the 26th of May 2015, a week later, we started what we call our Summer Institute, which is a seven-week in-residence program at the water center, where we work through Kwasi, we advertise this broadly among all the academic institutions across the United States, try to bring in the best and brightest graduate students to the water center for the seven-week in-residence program to tackle our biggest challenges with regard to the hurdles we need to get past to evolve our water prediction capabilities. It has been a tremendously successful program and for us, in addition to not only accelerating development and implementation of new capabilities, it provides us the opportunity for a seven week interview with these folks that are in residence with us. So we've hired a number of them and they've become key members of our team. And we've been doing that every year since our fifth Summer Institute is underway as we speak now. And we work very closely with UCAR and NCAR. UCAR, we recently stood up a group called the Community Advisory Committee for the Office of Water Prediction. What we wanted to do is reach out to the broader enterprise and hear from the enterprise and what their thoughts were in terms of what our plans are to evolve our predictive capabilities. So this CACWP or Community Advisory Committee for the Office of Water Prediction, we first met in with the very January 30th, 31st and February 1st in 2018. We got together, there's essentially 25 people on this team. It's co-chaired by David Maidman at the University of Texas and Don Klein, he's the Associate Director for Water at the United States Geological Survey. We've got a lot of federal agencies represented the private sector, NGOs and a number of people from the academic community. And that has been a very successful interaction for us at our second meeting during the AGU meeting last year and planning a third meeting this fall. And our focus, one of the primary recommendations of this group was really for us to establish a community development environment. And one of the things that we've been touting about the national water model that I'll talk about in a minute is utilizing the models of service, essentially making the model modular enough so that we can, any entity, you know, other than NOAA can develop a specific application that that, you know, if we have the appropriate interfaces and APIs that it sort of plug into the architecture. And you can configure the model however you want for whatever application you want. And we know it will configure it as we deem appropriate to support our operational mission. And then, of course, water resources managers, emergency managers and other enterprise stakeholders. So these are the key partnerships that we've been engaged in. Okay, so setting the stage for this transformation three, we've been resourced by Congress in three broad areas to evolve our enterprise. One is the centralized water forecasting demo. These resources first became available in 2015. And that was really demonstrating for the first time, running a high resolution continental scale model in a high performance computing environment in real time. And that became just about a year later, what was became the implementation of the national water model on the 16th of August 2016. We accelerated based upon, you know, the interest of Congress, we actually accelerated that implementation quite a bit, you know, more than we had originally planned. But nonetheless, we got the model out there. We haven't solved world hunger yet, but we have basically evolved it considerably now over the past few years. We implemented, I mentioned version one in August of 2016, then, you know, version 1.1, 1.2, and then actually tomorrow we implement version 2.0, where we actually go Oconus for the first time and we will begin to provide hydrologic forecast capability for the very first time, at least from a NOAA perspective for Hawaii. So that's a big step for us, along with a number of other enhancements to the national water model. Associated with that also is a centralized water resources, data services, and then an evaluation service. Obviously, you can't manage things very well if you don't measure it. And then the following year, we were resourced up and we continue to be resourced and to enhance our water prediction capability. We've demonstrated a hyper resolution modeling capability, a real-time forecast inundation mapping capability, and then linking basically the forecast that we generate with geospatial information, whether it be demographic, infrastructural, economic, political, you name it, to make that information actionable for decision makers. And I'll talk a bit more and show some examples of the real-time flood forecast inundation mapping capability. And then in 2017, this was about standing up the water center, expanding NOAA's WCOS, which is the Weather and Climate Operational Super Computing System, to support this 4A now in the high-performance computing in the water domain within NOAA. And then, as I mentioned earlier, coupling the national water model with ADCERC and our wave-watch, wave forecasting capabilities within NOAA to get total water in the coastal zone. So the water model, it's a continental-scale water resources model, providing high-resolution spatially-continuous information. This, you can see the map on the right there. This is basically the NHDPlus version 2 stream network generated by the USGS and the EPA. It is the hydrofabric on which we generate our forecast. And you can see that close up here on the right, these colored dots here simply represent USGS stream gauges that we currently make forecasts at. And then you can see the spatial fidelity here in the stream network. And for every little segment that you see there, we provide a forecast on an hourly basis. The bottom line is we have four operational configurations of the national water model. We have an analysis cycle that runs every hour. And every hour we also have a short-range forecast that's driven by our atmospheric model. It's called our High Resolution Rapid Refresh Model, which is our highest resolution convective convection resolving model at three kilometers spatially. And it goes out through essentially we utilize that input at forcing out through 18 hours. Then we have a medium range version of the forecast, which is forecast by our global forecast system, which was just upgraded last week, which is essentially globally a 13 kilometer resolved forecast that actually goes out through 16 days. We simply make our forecast out through 10 days utilizing that because essentially deterministic in nature. One of the things that, however, we'll be doing with the version 2.0 of the model is we will be issuing medium range ensemble forecast out through eight and a half days beginning tomorrow. And then we have a longer range version of the forecast, which we run four times daily at the 16 member ensemble driven by our climate forecast system in NOAA. So again, four instantiations of the model or configurations and we're generating information on an hourly basis for 2.7 million stream reaches. And the other thing is it's not just what we've done historically in the weather services, simply provide forecasts of quantity, you know, the flow. And then we convert the stage usually utilizing rating curves provided by the USGS. But one of the things we learned going out and talking to all manner of stakeholders, people were very interested in getting information, which was, you know, more information than just the quantity or the flow. Very interested in other parameters, which fully define the water budget in any particular catchment. And so we essentially provide, you know, more than 40 parameters that are for analyses and provide forecast for about 40 different parameters, you know, every in each one of those forecast cycles, the national water model for each one of those 2.7 million catchments. So we're producing a lot of information every day. And so it's sort of overwhelmed. It was really if we were just to dump that on the doorstep of our forecast staff, it would be literally overwhelming. So one of the things that we've been doing, and we've been doing this as part of our summer Institute, we've been doing an close partnership with the USGS is generating our and we have a geo intelligence division. It's one of the five divisions that comprise the Office of Water Prediction. And our geo intelligent staff, many of which are located at the National Water Center are developing hydroinformatics capabilities. And I'll show you a few of those here in a minute to really, you know, extract the full utility of the model and make it so that a forecaster at Weather Forecast Office, of which there's 122 of them, or one of our 13 river forecast centers can actually take this information to use it to support decision support. You know, we call it impact based decision support services. Okay, and now if we can make this animation go, let's see if I can. So let's see if that works. Oh, okay. So this is just an animation actually dates back to 2015, just to give you a sense of, you know, the fidelity of the bottle and what we're doing here. This is a three month, a three hour time step for the months of May, June and July of 2015. And it's basically just showing the stream flow and cubic feet per second. And it, you know, basically, you can see where you basically had rain hit the land surface and then it basically works its way through the stream network. And you can see this was a particularly active spring for Texas. There was a lot of flooding in Texas, in East Texas, fairly devastating, you know, in the spring of 2015. And they've had, you know, a lot of subsequent flooding, as I'm sure you're well aware. But anyway, that the flooding during this time frame certainly represented here. That just gives you a sense of an animation here. And I'll go to the next slide. So some of the collaboration with the USGS, I know our next speaker is from the USGS. So I wanted to certainly touch upon some of the things that we're doing with the USGS. And these these collaborative activities here are supported by the USGS is what they call 2WP. It's water, water prediction work program. And we got the senior leadership of NOAA and the USGS together about a year and a half ago, and we made a commitment to partner in these respective areas. One, observations, you know, basically doing performing a gap analysis to determine sort of what the best investment strategy would be to support, you know, high fidelity, terrestrial, continental scale, terrestrial modeling. And I'm sure I think you'll probably talk a little bit about NGWAS or maybe touch upon it, but the next generation water observing system, USGS was funded this year for the first time, some initial funding to begin to support that effort. And that's the focus this year is in the Delaware River Basin, but it forges us the opportunity to look at what day to have the biggest impact and what's the biggest bang for the buck from an investment perspective to support, you know, forecast at this fidelity, establishment of a community modeling development environment. So one of the things that I mentioned that, you know, was really excuse me, yeah, five minutes. OK, thank you. Establishing the community community modeling development environment. I mentioned the community advisory committee for water prediction. That was a primary recommendation they had. And this is something that we've been working with on the GS and with our folks at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who developed the Wharf Hydro architecture, which currently is the architecture we utilize for the national water model and the development and application of hydro informatics. I covered that and then co development of enhanced water prediction capabilities on the NHDP plus channel network, one improving stream flow and temperature water quality. We're talking about stream flow, particularly low flow or temperature. Certainly need to couple with a shallow, at least a shallow groundwater model. There's been a lot of work that's been going on between the GS and the Andoa in that area to couple a a groundwater model, a national groundwater model with the national water model to do it at the level of sophistication that we'd like to do it. One of the things we need to do is we simply need to rewrite the we need to re architect the national water model. We need to refactor the code and more modern languages than Fortran. And we made a commitment with the USGS about and NCAR about a month ago now to do that. So we're going to continue to evolve our existing capability. And then we're going to put a small team together on the process, putting a team together to basically rewrite the code and make it really modular in nature that supports not only enhanced interaction with with NCAR and with the USGS, but anybody that wants to work in this domain. OK. All right. Here's just a couple of examples of so back in August, I want to say it was August 20. Let's see, this is August 27. So Hurricane Harvey made landfall on Friday at about midnight. And that was, I think, August 25. On Sunday morning at about 6 40, 5 a.m. Eastern time, I got a call from the director of the Texas Division of Emergency Emergency Management and said, we're aware that you have capabilities that could support us in this flood flight. Can you guys, we know you're not operational right now because we weren't. Can you spin up to support us? And I said, let me talk to my boss. So I called Louis Uccellini, those of you that know him, he's director of the National Weather Service and said, you know, I had this conversation. We said, can you support him? I said, I think we can. So we rallied our troops, you know, our visiting scientists, our contractors, our federal staff who are Lord only knows where that weekend, called them all in on a Sunday. They work all night. And by the next morning, we had, you know, written basically of all our capabilities to run on a cron so that we could produce every day on a daily basis by 10 a.m. Eastern time, 9 a.m. Central time, a suite of products to support decisions being made by the Texas Division of Emergency Management. And these products basically augmented what the Corps of Engineers was doing with their H&H models on basically the Main Stem Rivers. So basically, this is, you know, providing information where otherwise we wouldn't have any. And this is just an example of one of our hydroinformatics capabilities. This is time to bank flow, which is essentially a one and a half year return flow as, you know, surrogate for bankful. This is Buffalo Bayou downtown, Houston. This was helpful information to them to though when we would achieve a bankful condition. We also basically took the water model output and generated inundation maps. We did analyses. We did forecasts using, you know, the flow at any particular time. And also what they were particularly interested in was mapping the peak flow in the next five days. They really wanted to know where it was going to be wet. And if they knew where the maximum extent of the inundation, they would know where obviously where it was going to be dry. And they were basically, you know, plucking people off of rooftops, trying to set up staging areas. And they absolutely had to know where, you know, things weren't going to get wet or inundated. And the light blue here is simply our RC forecast basically routed through the NHDP plus stream network and the inundation map generated utilizing that approach. And there's the water model inundation. Verification showed that these were basically 70 to 80 percent accurate, if you will, you know, in terms of a hit. We talked to FEMA, you know, they've they've basically told us many times, don't let perfection be the enemy of good. We've been operating for for 20 years without information. You know, please provide us what you got and bringing it down to home stretch here. So for those of you familiar with what we do on a routine basis, this is our our weather service main page, our A HAPS page, Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service. Here's all the points that we are routinely making forecasts, color coded based by level of threat. When you come to this page, you see all the USGS observations, and then you can also see the forecast based upon them. This is an ensemble approach in terms of water resources and longer range predictions, which quantify certainty, an ESP approach, which really based upon historical climate forecasting, forecast for things. Here is the new Hydrologic Ensemble forecast service, which basically accounts for both atmospheric and hydrologic uncertainty accounting for the best atmospheric forecast we have. And you can see a difficult to see here, but it is a product which basically better accounts for the uncertainty. And it does it not just in the long range, but from minutes to months. And then we certainly plan to use a national water model for that application. The longer range version of the national water model right now only goes out through 30 days. We've been experimenting for the water year in the Rio Grande basin with some fairly positive results, the natural flow forecast. But the bottom line, we continue to work on that. And then summarizing here, our water services are evolving. Continental scale modeling approach, producing consistent street level. Some at the sea information we're implementing a much more physically based approach. And we're doing this in partnership with the broader water enterprise. And we've got this new organization, which is the Office of Water Prediction, which we were formed on the 1st of April, 2015. And we've got our new National Water Center, which truly is serving as a catalyst to make stuff happen. And it's a lot of fun. I will tell you in my federal career, which is about 35 years. I've been in this business for about 35 years. This has been a really fun project. And it's really nice to be a part of it. A project where you really can affect sub-substitutive change. And that's what we feel about this project. And I think what's being born through the partnerships with our federal water partners, the academic community, the NGOs, and really the private sector, it's really an exciting time. So with that, I'll take questions or take questions at the end. Or how do you want to do that? Yeah, we have about five minutes for questions. So first, let's thank our speaker, Dr. Alexander. So we'll do the put your flag up if you'd like a question. And every once in a while, this will remind me that there's people online. I just came from a WMO meeting. So I'm really used to this. OK, yeah, yeah. And I will do my best to keep the correct order. So I have John Nusha Dave right now. John. There we go. What is the plan or the strategy for adapting the new elevation models based on LiDAR as this moves forward? Well, we are one of the things we're doing as part of a first of all, what USGS is doing, like with the 3DEP program, is really critically important to where we want to go, that train and bathymetry data or much higher resolved terrain and bathymetry data are really critical to what we're doing. Because essentially what we're doing right now in the model, it's sort of a very simple channel parameterization. And we want to what we showed in last year's Summer Institute is that the more highly resolved as one would expect the channel, the more accurate the forecast, because essentially what we're in the more accurate, not only the flow, but the conversion to stage because we back calculate Manning's equation as part of our effort to actually do the inundation mapping. And so it actually had a really profound impact on our forecast. So one of the things NOAA is involved in right now is we have a NOAA 2018 and 19 DOC, Department of Commerce, Agency Priority Gold, there's four of them. And we own one of them in the Weather Service and the Office of Water Perdition. And that is to demonstrate in real time, demonstrate real time flood inundation mapping for the state of Texas. And so what we're doing right now is basically going in and enhancing the channel definition wherever all those data are available to enhance the quality of the forecast that we produce in the associated inundation. And then demonstrating how to make that information in real time and to be able to communicate and link it to infrastructural information to support the decisions that are made. So but again, that information is really critical to us and you have strongly support what the USGS is doing, in particular, with regard to the three-depth effort. So thanks. Yes. Or I don't know who's next, but yeah. Hi, this is Ingrid Padilla from the National Science Foundation. Most of these modeling is deterministic, except I guess the probabilistic one that you mentioned at the end, which I'm going to guess it's stochastic. Is there a plan to integrate artificial intelligence in the data assessment and prediction? So first of all, with the last thing I show is the hydrologic ensemble forecast service. That's, you know, that is, you know, that ensemble provides, you know, stochastic model provides, you know, uncertainty information. With regard to the national water model, we do have a long, our 30-day forecast is an ensemble driven by our climate forecast system. And with the implementation tomorrow, the upgrade version two point over the national water model, we will providing a medium range ensemble. The help me out of the rest of your question. I'm sorry. I just. Are you just going to tell me? Artificial, yes. So we are dabbling with artificial intelligence, not necessarily in the quantification of uncertainty, but more in the dealing with anthropogenic processes. So, you know, trying to predict what a water resources operator would do a week from now, two weeks from now, three weeks from now, based upon a particular inflow or pool elevation or whatever other parameters are deemed relevant by the by the model. We have done this for the ACF basin with with fairly good results. But that is our first foray with AI in terms of supporting, addressing a particularly large challenge with for us with the national water model. Because remember, we're running this off in a high performance computing environment. We don't have a forecaster in the loop that's accounting for what a reservoir operator may be doing. So we have to find a way to account for that over time. And that is essentially how we're trying to do it. OK, I think we have time for two more questions. And then we'll have to we'll have to cut it off. So Nusha and then Dave. Tom, thank you for your presentation. I was actually part of the original national water. Oh, the ensemble forecasting in the 2000s. OK, OK. I wrote two papers on that. So I'm a big fan. My question for you was are you guys able to provide any information about the recent Northwest or the Arkansas actually flooding, the Midwest flooding and were you involved in some of that forecasting? Was did they use some of your forecast for decision making and the disaster management? Yeah. So we were heavily involved in that in terms of, you know, our our field offices, our root forecast centers and weather forecast offices, you know, communicating forecast information potential impacts and at the disposal of our staff. They have both the forecasting applications that they run, you know, the lump parameterized Sacramento model that that they operate as well as the output of the national water model, the extent to which they use the national water model for the Arkansas flooding in particular. I don't know the details of that. I don't know that we've really done gone back and done an assessment of that just yet because we have literally since January been in flood on the Mississippi. And it's just been we no pun intended inundated. You know, I mean, our our river for our weather forecast officers staff to be 24 hours a day. And as you know, our river forecast centers are staffed to be 16 hours a day. And many of them, and at least in the in the Mississippi base that have been operating on a 24 hour day basis for a really protracted period. So they are, you know, they're all hands on deck just trying to provide service. So we haven't really had the opportunity yet to go back and do an analysis of, you know, how well we how well we did in particular. So thank you. Thanks, Tom, great presentation. My question is, during the last administration, we stood up the Internet of Water Program and it subsequently transferred down to Duke University and currently it's being for the next two years kind of developed there. Do you see it? My question is, do you anticipate that that would have value bringing it into our national water models? Yes, it's interesting you asked me that question because I just mentioned with the, you know, the put my thing like a name tag up sideways there. I came from WMO. Well, one of the individuals that went with me is I was the sort of lead for the water part of the delegation. One of the folks that went with us is Peter Colehan, who is in charge now leading the effort for the Internet of Water. Peter used to be one of my five division chiefs in the Office of Water Prediction until December of last year. He was the service innovation and partnership division director. And so we brought him back to support the WMO effort. And yes, we have been coordinating and we continue to coordinate with Peter. A lot of the, you know, the data that would be captured via the Internet of Water from the states would certainly be a value in terms of initializing, calibrating and even verifying the national water model. So, yes. Thank you. Thank you. And OK. Yeah, outstanding. Thank you again. That was really great. Yeah. Really excellent. So next, we're going to turn to the USGS, a partner, and Sandra Evertz. And while she's getting everything ready to go, there will have time for questions after this. And if you if you're in the audience and you want to raise a question to you, you can do that too. Sorry, you don't have a car. Just just wave and I'll put you in the queue. So please, Sandra. I thank you. I'm Sandy Evertz. And I've been with the USGS for a little bit more than 30 years. I currently am with our Water Mission Area Headquarters and our Office of Planning and Programming as our program science coordinator. And I'll talk for about 15-20 minutes about USGS water priorities. Really, to meet 21st Century Water Resource Challenges, we have identified four priorities for targeted investment and effort. A number of years ago, we brought on a new Associate Director for Water, Don Klein. Many of you know him. And he had a vision that if we restructured and realigned the work that we were already doing, some of our very good work, we could actually produce some new water products for the nation. And so I'm going to talk to you about, you know, where we're headed with that. We have four water priorities that are interrelated, enhanced observation networks that are part of our next gen water observing system priority. This data we've envisioned serve through our modernized national water information system. And these data and water delivery systems directly being coupled to modeling and new modeling tools to drive prediction. And then finally, all of these are integrated into water availability assessments. Now, we've done a lot of assessments over time. We've worked in water availability assessments. I started way back when we were doing regional aquifer assessments, you know, 25 years ago or more. We have water quality assessments. But what we always had were different funding line items where we were doing water availability here and water quality assessments here. And we did work together as more organically or scientists to scientists. But now we've realigned so that we're actually co-planning and standing up our assessments holistically. And I think that's really exciting. It's something we've wanted to do. But now we're structured so that we can do that much, much better than we had had been able to before. So I thought I'd just share some of the drivers of our four priorities that I just mentioned. Of course, we've had a science strategy. We work from that science strategy. But in 2018, we also had recommendation from the national academies for future water priorities for the nation and really looked at our research efforts and provided some suggestions there. And I should mention with our restructuring, we finally have brought our researchers into the broader community of water resource professionals in the USGS. And so we're really aligning our research much more closely with some of our higher priority and larger products that we're producing. So it's also exciting. In 2018, there was a presidential memo on Western water availability and that's driving some of what we're doing with our integrated water availability assessments. The Secure Water Act of 2009 required us to develop a national water census and we're still doing that and that's integrated into those water availability assessments as well. We receive input from the water sub cabinet. This is a group of federal representatives from multiple agencies, EPA, DOI, USDA, NOAA, Army Corps, DOE. And these folks are meeting at a high level periodically so that we are talking across all of the sectors that have federal water responsibilities and that's also new and very exciting. And we USGS have been tasked with advancing water prediction via enhanced data collection as well as integrated modeling which you're gonna hear a little bit more about. And then of course, we're across the landscape. We have water science centers in every state. We work shoulder to shoulder with our partners. We have many stakeholders and that also feeds into our overall directions because we are very well connected with the country and what its needs are. So I'm gonna start by talking about our water prediction work program because that most closely aligns with what Tom just spoke about. This is our national effort to develop modeling tools that enhance and drive water prediction. It's part of this ambitious federal partnership that you heard about for developing a new national water prediction capacity built on collaboration. First and foremost, we're working to improve and augment our predictive water modeling capabilities across a range of spatial and temporal scale. So we are working nationally with NOAA and others. We also are enhancing our water prediction capabilities at smaller spatial scales as well. And as part of this, as you just heard, we're working with others to cultivate this broad collaborative national water modeling community. We have shared computing environments that we're standing up or others are standing up and we're sharing data. We're sharing modeling components and interfaces and we're having forms that are being held collaboratively. One of the first things we're doing this with this water prediction work program, or TWP as we fondly refer to it, is we are working to enhance the national water model of the weather service by working with them to develop a groundwater module to improve base flow prediction and that's forecast predictions. And then I also heard someone asking about topography. We're also working on enhanced topography and bath symmetry so that we can also help inform more accurate predictions as well. And then we are taking our USGS science, a lot of our process science that many of our researchers have been working on and that is incorporated into a variety of different models and we are working to couple some of those key models and processes into the national water model to drive prediction of stream temperature first and foremost. So we have the national weather service predicting stream flow, USGS is coming in helping improve that accuracy with more groundwater simulation but then also we're jumping on and doing temperature prediction and also sediment and constituent prediction. We're working towards capturing sediment as it comes off the landscape and forecasting that as well as entrainment of those various water quality constituents in the sediment and transport of that in stream. So we've been involved in prediction for a while but now we have a concerted effort to do large scale prediction. At present, this is a fairly new team and what you're hearing about today again are current high priorities. It's a lot of work we've been doing already but now we've aligned into these four high priorities and aligned many people who have been working on similar work but maybe somewhat desperately. And so we have just recently stood up these various science teams as part of our 2WP program and each of those science teams has just been finishing up their science perspectives for their piece of this overall effort just this summer. So for example, our temperature team is working on how USGS science and data for water temperature can be used to forecast stream reach temperature. Our hydrology team is the team working to incorporate groundwater into the national water model. Our interoperability team is the team that's working on how model components should be modularized to better be used to predict multiple components of the water cycle. Previously, we had an office of groundwater and office of surface water and office of water quality, very successful efforts but our model developers for each discipline were in separate offices. Our restructuring has put all those model developers together in a team and so we can more accurately and better align the modeling and add plug and play components so that we can model and use the models as needed. And this brings us to our next priority and that is to stand up a next generation water observing system. As you're aware, we have nearly 3 million stream reaches in the country. We have 10,000 stream gauges, that's monitoring less than 1% of all of those stream reaches. And actually out of those 10,000 gauges, only about 8,200 monitor stream flow year round continuously. But these modern models that you're hearing about, they need higher density data and they need data that describes more than stream flow. We need information on groundwater levels and soil moisture and ET and water storage and snowpack and such. And so our current monitoring networks limit our ability to accurately understand and to predict water resource conditions using these advanced models. And that's what this NGWAS or Next Gen Water Observing System is all about. But we can't monitor everywhere at high density, spatially and temporarily. We know we can't do that. And so the strategy is to develop highly instrumented networks in about 10 medium sized basins across the country that represent some larger water resource regions such as the regions you see here. And so once we highly wire these particular basins, we can better understand our systems and extrapolate that knowledge through models. We also are augmenting our existing stream gauge network that we already have across the nation by adding temperature and some other probes to collect some additional information. And all of this is to predict more accurate, more accurately the water quantity and quality and use at unmonitored locations. So ultimately our Next Gen Water Observing System is intended to provide real time field and remote sensing data on all of these components, stream flow, stream velocity, water cycle components like ET and snowpack, a broad suite of water quality constituents so we don't have our National Water Quality Assessment project anymore, but that data are being collected through our networks still and are being incorporated into these integrated assessments still. And we're looking a little bit more in terms of monitoring between groundwater and surface water and that might be of interest to this particular group today. We're here gathered around groundwater. We're installing piezometers and stream banks where we're collecting temperature continuously as well as the temperature in the stream to be able to better understand exchange of water between groundwater and surface water and a myriad of other technology to get at groundwater surface water interactions. Of course sediment, transport and water use are also a big part of this. The Next Gen Water Observing System is really a combination of mobile and fixed assets in these 10 basins. And again we're not there yet but this is where we're headed. So we have a pilot and that pilot as Tom mentioned is in the Delaware River Basin. And we have enhanced mainstream monitoring on our stream gauges by adding temperature and salinity monitoring at more of our gauges or at all of those gauges and enhanced our communication systems as well. Another very exciting aspect of The Next Gen Water Observing Systems is we're standing up these innovation sites. Sites where we identify locations where we're testing new technologies or allowing people to test operationalizing some of their existing technologies and encouraging people, not just USGS but universities and states and others, developers to come to the same locations, use this as a test bed, compare their results that they're getting with other people's results as well for new water quality and flow technologies. We've added stream monitoring in smaller sub basins of these watersheds. We typically have not had stream gauges monitoring watersheds that are less than 50 square miles but we know that that's important to our ecological systems. And so we're adding basins or gauges in those sub basins to better characterize hydrologic dynamics and improve hydrologic and ecological models. Again, innovation sites in these smaller streams as well. And not all of the monitoring with The Next Gen Water Observing System is continuous. We do have plans in our collecting some discrete data on a limited scale. Really, the gist of The Next Gen Water Observing System is really to drive innovation and monitoring. And that brings us to our next priority, our integrated water availability assessments. As I mentioned, we're aligning all of our assessments so that we have a more holistic understanding of water supply and demand, quality and use in various settings. And we're working towards evaluating long-term trends and water availability. And this is inclusive again of water quantity and quality. We've always done a lot of water quality trend work. We've actually done some, a fair amount of water quantity trend work but this is being aligned, providing seasonal and decadal forecasts of availability and informing water resource division decisions, bringing in some social economic tools which is somewhat new for USGS. We're piloting this as well. Just as with our 2WP, we have teams that are standing up projects. And I forgot to mention with NGWAS, we also have people working on various types of technology and we have technology prospectuses that have been developed this summer as well. Our pilot project, our first pilot project for the IWAS, which is how we finally refer to this priority or program, is in the Delaware River Basin because the idea is if we have all of this new data and all of this really wired watershed, how do we get that into models? How do we inform the assessments? And so our water prediction folks who are developing the modeling tools and our assessment folks are in the same basin with our people who are standing up the next gen and water observing system. And working with the local stakeholders also to identify what's important to them. So we have these tools and these approaches that we're going to march across the landscape. But when we're in basins, we also want to answer local questions of interest. And in the Delaware River Basin, the question or interest is really drought. And we're improving our stream flow prediction of drought or during periods of drought with this project. We're also developing a model to predict public supply wall use on a daily basis, which is part of our water use program is being incorporated into this. Because we always put out our water use compilations on a five year cycle, it's a very useful product, but it doesn't always meet the needs of folks in the interim. And so we're using a lot more modeling to predict water use in various categories in the interim. And so we're working on some public supply wall modeling tools in the Delaware. And also simulating water quality trends. We have a second pilot basin for the IWAS down here in the Trinity. And this project is also looking at long-term trends analysis and at socioeconomic impacts in response to supply and demand scenarios. So that's something that they're looking at. We had an infusion of directed co-op matching funds this year to be able to fund some projects that would help us push our integrated assessments forward. And we're funding some work to look at data and information delivery and processes for incorporating water quality and groundwater into some of our predictive modeling as well. The IWAS is national and it's also regional. So we saw the Delaware River Basin Pilot, but we also have tools that we're working on nationally. We're developing data, consistent spatial data, temporally and spatially across the country for many components of the water cycle. That's one of the directives through the Secure Water Act. And so we have national deliverables that speak to that. And then we have some regional deliverables. So above the line, these are our national extent deliverables in the near term. By the end of this year, we're gonna be delivering daily information on water availability indices focused on quantity. And this is an indices. So this is not predicting availability in terms of absolute amounts, but these are relative amounts. And by 2020, that will be inclusive of water quality. And by 2021, that's inclusive of water use. And again, we have our teams who have been meeting all summer. Oh, actually it's all this past year and standing up the approaches for doing this. At the regional extent, we have our Delaware River Basin Pilot. And we will be selecting the next basin to move into that presidential memo I mentioned, requires us to look at Western water issues. Both the NGWAS, our water observing system and our water availability assessment projects are gonna be moving into a basin in the West. We have stood up a team and a committee to identify criteria for selecting that basin. And we'll be soliciting feedback from outside the USGS and from stakeholders to help us identify this next basin. So again, ultimately, we'd like to have 10 of these next-gen water observing system basins. We've got one pilot now and we're working through the process for bringing more on. And then, yeah, again, stakeholder engagement to stand up the next basin. And that brings us to our National Water Information System Modernization. As we collect more intense data spatially, yes, almost done. As we collect more data spatially and temporally, and we have mobile assets, we're collecting data up and down streams, we have drone data. Our information systems have not historically handled this kind of data. So we have a team working on this high priority of modernizing our water information system as well. We also need more automated data processing because this is a high volume data. But we need our data to be rapidly accessible and delivered to support near-time water forecasts and availability and water hazard situations. We have a lot of decision support tools. We've had a lot of decision support tools. We've had a lot of mapping tools. We are streamlining our presence online, making more of a lean portfolio, making it easier to find and utilize our information. One story that really resonates with me that was told by one of our developers in Texas was, a number of years back, there was a big Memorial Day flooding. His own home was at risk. And he was online trolling through multiple stream gauge webpages that were upstream from gauges that were upstream of this home, trying to decide if he should evacuate his family. And he was water aware and he said, this is not adequate. People need to be able to go to a dashboard. They need to be able to really understand the situation. They developed the Texas Water Dashboard. We're looking at scaling something like that up and providing information in a way that's more useful, especially for making decisions rapidly in an emergency. So that brings me to the last slide. Some of the things that we've been experimenting with is on the left, we're adding webcams to our stream gauges. And we can see as the hydrograph unfolds here with discharge and water level, what does that actually look like? What is going on at that site? And here on the right, we've been creating visualizations of entire water years to see what the water year looked like. And we can see the effects of some hurricanes and some drought situations and really getting a better feel for what is going on in our water resources over the course of the year. And with that, I can take some questions. Excellent. Well, let me start around the edges if anyone, since I wave at me now. Okay. Oh, yes. Charge. US EPA, Office of Research and Development. Great talk, Sandra. Thank you. One question. What other water quality things are you looking at? You mentioned sediment and temperature. Yes. So at present, that's initially what we're looking to add to the National Water Model, but we still are sampling our National Water Quality Assessment Project networks for a myriad of chemical constituents. And Ken is here from NACWA. I mean, I don't think anything has changed in terms of the types of constituents we're sampling for. I know we're standing up some PFOS methodologies in our lab, but anything else? I don't have one, just note the other. You're right. The analytical measurements are not easily replicated with the probe. So the probe development is still a key area for development. And that's a good point. We are working with a lot of developers on sensor technology. And again, that's what some of those test sites are for. So we can test some of those out where we're also sampling and having samples sent off to the laboratory as well. Thank you, Ken. That's great. I just, I heard PFOS. And I'm thinking, you know, there's I guess higher priority items from these chemical constituents because I heard a lot of actually physical parameters and not much on the chemical parameters. So if you're looking for input, nitrate would be really great. Because I mean, nutrients are our biggest issue from the standpoint of large-scale river and transport. So rather than PFOS, I guess I would pitch for nutrients. Right. Well, PFOS is something we're developing some methodologies for so we can get more data on that. We have always been monitoring for the nutrients and we have nutrient sensors as well. And we've had a nutrient sensor challenge. I live in Ohio, so you know, very familiar with Western Lake Erie basin issues with eutrophication and that is always on our radar. In terms of what we're adding to the national water model, initially that's a really big, heavy lift. It's temperature and sediment, but nutrients are not being ignored and we are standing up more probes. And I say we're enhancing our stream gauging network. We're trying to collect more nutrient information as well. But thank you. Always good to know what people are thinking. Thank you, Sandra. It was a very good presentation. My question is, it seems that the next generation water observing system is highly dependent on data. My concern is, is that I've at least been told by various people, Don Kline in particular, that funding for our gauging station network in the United States is shifting from federal. Can you see that as problematic? And the second part of that is right to your question. Are you trying to integrate artificial intelligence or anything else in the next generation? So I'm not on the development team. So I can't speak to exactly how they're intending to integrate artificial intelligence, but we have our best and brightest working on this. Next gen water observing system is driving that innovation in monitoring and it's generating the data that you're speaking about. We have actually seen an increase in funding for our stream gauging network and for our monitoring because of this program. So we had a million and a half dollar increase this past year and then a $12 million increase proposed. So this is really getting attention and we think that because we have really done a good job and planning and communicating what the needs are and how we can help support the modeling efforts that we need as a nation, we're getting a lot of support from Congress. Thank you. Thanks. Hi, I'm Sarah Brennan, I'm with Applied Sciences, NASA's Applied Sciences Water Resources Program. And I was curious about your process to identify the basins and stakeholders that you're potentially thinking about moving your pilot project to. The reason I bring it up is a few years ago we started the Western Waters Application Office that's based out in California and the role of that office really is to connect stakeholders in the area to data and resources, not only from NASA, but other federal agencies. So I'm curious what your plan is. I'm glad you identified yourself. Right now we have our committee, our team that is working on the technical criteria we want so that we have representative basins across the country. And I was just tasked to leave the National Stakeholder Engagement piece only about a week ago. So I'll be glad to talk to you, but we do want to find out, obviously we think if we're fully funded and again, that's always an F down the road, you never know how, what we're going to get from Congress in the long term. But if we're fully funded, we want to have 10 of these representative highly instrumented watersheds with models and such to go along with that. But there are many more water resource regions in the country. And so we have to be selective in terms of where we go so we can extrapolate to the greater, the greatest amount of resources as possible. But it's really important to be answering those stakeholder questions too, because there are definitely basins that have more challenges than others. And so we're trying to develop a plan to systematically collect that information so we can sort through that and Don Klein really wants a nice process, something that's traceable in terms of our selection process. And I just met with one of our decision scientists out in Denver last week to start really thinking about where we're headed with this. But as with many of these other high priority efforts that I mentioned, we're standing a lot of this up just as we speak, we're working on all kinds of prospectuses, as I mentioned, but it's not like we're casting aside the work USGS has been doing. We're aligning the work, I think more effectively. So I don't want you to think that, this is all brand new, but it's being aligned more effectively. And we're just beginning in some areas. Thank you. Great, and we'll give Nusha the last question. Thank you, Sandy, for your talk. First of all, I really appreciate seeing you mentioning that you're trying to sort of break the silos, especially within the development group, which is extremely important. My question is slightly different, which is focused on terminologies and the way that we report these numbers. Obviously, this generation is all about how you use multiple data sources to fill the gaps and how we sort of can create this mega data sets that incorporates various data sources. And with that comes the challenge of what data am I picking from USGS and how am I aligning that with NASA data and how that sort of aligns up with EPA data, for example. I wonder if there's any conversation going on at the, you know, within the agency, not within your agency, but across different agencies to sort of try to create more sort of uniform terminologies and try to sort of help the users understand what is how these data sources match and what terminology we're using for them. Sure, I mentioned our Texas Water Data Dashboard and in Texas, they're doing that. They're bringing in USGS data along with external data and serving it up together. It's new for us to do that. It's always challenged our policies in terms of how we serve our data alongside others. Much of what we do when we serve USGS data alongside other folks' data, because it's all very good data and if we need high density data, we need it all, it's through AQUI. And I actually am the USGS co-chair for our Streamflow Information Collaborative and we have been meeting monthly to try to see what systems are out there in terms of serving Streamflow data and one of our tasks this year is to find out what all of that data is. And so we are having those conversations. We're not there yet. But if anybody is interested in Streamflow in particular, but actually any of the time series data that we might wanna serve from other entities altogether, let me know and I'll make sure you get an invite to those discussions. All right, thank you. Thank you very much. From big national models, now we're going to the States which is obviously key stakeholders in the development of these sorts of tools. We have an hour and 45 minutes in total. So if each speaker shoots for 15 to 20 minutes and we'll have time for questions. If everybody pushes over 20, we really won't. So I'll maybe wave at you at 15 and we'll see where we go from there. So thank you. First speaker is Max Gomberg. So good morning everyone. I'm Max Gomberg from California's Water Resources Control Board where the state regulatory agency that's responsible for implementing the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, as well as running the Revolving Loan Funds for both clean water and drinking water in California. And we also run water rights, groundwater management and a host of other programs including urban conservation. I direct our climate change program as well as work on some of our human right to water work on safe and affordable drinking water and urban conservation. And I should note that in California we have a structure where we have a state board with five gubernatorial appointees. Those are my board members. We also have nine regional water quality control boards and NUSHA is on one of those boards and Jay was formerly on one of those boards. So I'm gonna take us through our big challenges. So we generally focus in the West on drought. However, we also get flooding sometimes not at the frequency, the way that the Midwest does but we've had some big ones and we're due again our last devastating flood was in 1862. And of course with climate change we're moving to the extremes. When we get more wetter, more intense, drier, longer and more severe droughts and we still are very much in a regulatory and policy framework that looks backward in terms of how we assess climate and our hydrology. So it's a big change and a big challenge for us. I think that this has all been pretty well documented by the IPCC reports and elsewhere. The one thing I wanna note on here which is really a big focus right now is that last bullet, the fire impacts because what we're seeing not only is the forests burned but now we're seeing because we have so many developments in the wildland interface where when we have big conflagrations they are taking out whole communities and there are really significant and problematic water quality consequences that arise from that and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So we have our latest major drought a few years back and while it didn't completely wipe out our economy it had a really significant impact on our entire economy from agriculture to our forest lands to our urban sector and we are still dealing with and adapting to the consequences of that drought. In particular, trying to really help communities that were they experienced shortage during that drought build resiliency, build more diversity into their sources and emergency supplies so that we don't go through that again when the next drought hits, which will be soon. And of course on the flooding side of things for those who aren't familiar with this picture this is the spillway below Lake Oroville which is our largest dam and what you can see here is it's completely eroded right there. We had several atmospheric river storms come in and we thought we were gonna have a real tragedy on our hands, we actually evacuated 200,000 people from below the dam and thankfully we didn't get any more storms. Now that spillway has been reconstructed and repaired but it's really a cautionary tale which I know you all are familiar with on what happens when we build infrastructure and we don't maintain it. So I work in the policy realm at the state level and I just wanted to note some of the major actions that have been taken over the past five years as we try to cope with our changing conditions and key challenges in the state. So from top to bottom, we have a new governor as of this January and he recently issued an executive order directing all of the state agencies that deal with water, our natural resources agency, our environmental protection agency where I work our department of food and agriculture to inventory and assess all of our existing water related programs and data and to chart a path forward for the next what he hopes to be eight years under that administration. And one of the things that our governor has made is his key priority is delivering safe drinking water and to that end in our state budget that was just adopted by our legislature last week, there was a major shift to take money from the state's greenhouse gas reduction fund which had really been solely focused on actions that reduce carbon emissions and now expand that more in a resilience direction and in particular to add to take money out of that fund which is generated through a cap and trade program auctions and devote an ongoing source of revenue for safe drinking water. We have about a million people in the state who lack safe drinking water and that's due to all kinds of different natural and manmade contaminants and most of them live in communities that simply don't have the capacity to operate and maintain treatment systems. And so this has been a big challenge for the state. There was no agreement going into this year on how to fund a solution. There was agreement that we needed to come up with a solution and this is what was negotiated. The state has also been really focused on conservation mainly in the urban sector in response to the last drought. So there was major legislation past last year that sets not only new drought planning requirements in terms of what water management agencies have to do as droughts intensify and trying to get some more uniformity around that across the state as well as specific requirements for all of our large urban agencies in terms of how they look at what is an efficient water budget for indoor use, outdoor use and their own distribution system losses. So we're working on that. We have passed over the last few years several bonds actually but two significant bonds at the state level to make money available both for infrastructure as well as ecosystem restoration. It's not nearly enough and it's not sustainable which is something that Nusha and I are always talking about. And then in 2014 as the drought intensified we finally got it together to become the 50th state to have a regulatory framework over groundwater withdrawals. And so we're working on implementing that and I'll speak more about that in the afternoon. So I wanted to mention broadly what the state is doing on greenhouse gas mitigation specifically to point out the ways that we are trying to support that work in the water sector in California. And in particular on the bottom bullet we're really focused on the short-life climate pollutants both because a lot of those pollutants are created by agricultural practices. And so overall as we try to implement our groundwater law and look at improving water quality outcomes from our agricultural sector whether that's farms or dairies, feedlots we're also looking at how do we reduce the methane as part of that work. In addition, we have a specific project funded by money that the US EPA gave to us to look at the potential for diverting organic material from landfills where it creates methane to wastewater treatment plants for digestion and development of gas for onsite or offsite use. So we're working on getting that report out later this year. And that's complementary to our broad state strategy towards really increasing our composting capacity again to reduce the methane emissions from organics going to landfills. Here's what the state's emissions breakdown looks like. And if you look on the left-hand side you can see the big majority almost two thirds of our emissions are from our transportation sector. People drive a lot in California as well as our industrial sector. So think cement production, et cetera. But then if you look at the smaller slices on the right-hand side there's actually a nexus between a lot of the work we do in the water sector and achieving reductions in those areas when we think about energy efficiency for water systems whether that's in efficiency of pumping whether it's conservation whether it's more capture of urban stormwater to reduce the need for conveyance. All of that fits in agriculture I mentioned and of course the residential use when it comes to water heating we're working on in collaboration with our energy partners as well. Just to note we have a long way to go. The state set a 2020 target which we met but our 2030 target is a real steep drop in emissions. And as with the global emissions picture that drop is not materializing. In fact, we're going in the wrong direction so it's highly concerning. So on the adaptation or now the word de jure is resilience side of things. We're really working on how do we go from plan and assess? We've done a lot of that. We've done a lot of vulnerability assessments. We've done a lot of planning but to move to the next step beyond that to actually finding the will to make investments difficult decisions. That's where we are right now as a state and whether that is sea level rise or whether it's communities that are at high risk of being destroyed by fire. Do we rebuild them? How much money do we put forward from the state treasury, from the federal treasury, from FEMA when we have those recurring disasters? Those are the big questions we're grappling with right now. And then of course on timing and magnitude, we have, as someone mentioned earlier this morning, a lot of our population nationally lives along the coast in California, a lot of our population is along the coast and we're looking at major sea level rise impacts. Again, if our emissions trajectory stays as it is and we're really grappling with through our coastal management agencies, well, how do we facilitate retreat or some type of barriers and what infrastructure gets protected first? So that's a big challenge we're dealing with in terms of priorities as well. And then of course there's always this question about are we gonna go pace-wise or are we gonna try to scale up and move really quickly, which is an ongoing discussion. So in terms of water infrastructure, probably the bullets on here with the exception of the one about Proposition 218 are familiar to everyone in the room. We have a crisis funding model that's true at the federal level, that's true at the state level. We're good at responding after the fact, but I will note that we are blowing through our emergency response funds in California, mainly due to firefighting. We set aside $200 million a year for the past few years for firefighting. We blew right through that budget. And as these become more frequent occurrences, we really all have to grapple with how much money we continue to put towards emergency response in places where the emergencies go from periodic to frequent. And again, on funding, we really don't have a sustainable resilience funding source. As I mentioned, we have a mitigation funding source, which is now being somewhat transitioned into a mitigation and adaptation source, but there really hasn't been sustainable funding put towards any of these adaptive actions. We also have a constitutional amendment dating back to the 90s. California is a ballot initiative state. So when something gets on the ballot and is approved, it goes into the state constitution, which says essentially that to raise water rates, you've got to go through a process where you define the rate increase in terms of cost of service. And there's a big debate taking place through the courts and as well in our legislature about really what, how do you define cost of service? Does disaster response, for example, is that included in cost of service? Can you put a surcharge on bills for that? I'd say it's still very much an open question along those lines. Lack of federal support. Probably many of you are familiar with the fact that really there's been a sharp and continuous decline in federal support for water and wastewater infrastructure since the 1970s. And it's gone from 20 to 30% of state and local funding needs to about 4% currently. And it really, again, sort of begs the question of is that sustainable given all of the challenges we face over the long run? And a big focus in California is equity. As with many other places in the world, we have a tremendous amount of income inequality. It's growing and the people who are the most disadvantaged and marginalized also face the greatest environmental threats. And so we're trying to rectify that through various investments in particular on safety and water. Pivas was already mentioned. Our other big challenges, again, sort of in the broader realm of funding and capacity, the cost of water is rising much faster than the rate of inflation. Three to four times the rate of inflation, that is only going to continue if not increase when we think about all the infrastructure needs, emerging contaminants, and a host of other requirements that we are now placing on our drinking water and wastewater systems. And that really speaks to that third bullet there, the paradigm shift. It used to be that to be a successful water manager, all you had to do was make sure that what was being delivered out of the pipes met the water quality standards and it was reliable. Now there are a lot of other requirements that go towards running a successful water utility or wastewater utility for that matter. And I see a real workforce development need in terms of the next generation of leadership of water systems. And then of course in California, where we grow the lion's share of the fresh fruit and vegetables for the country and are part of a global market, we were going to see major shifts in crop patterns production in particular as we implement our groundwater law which requires sustainable groundwater basins. And what that means for our economy and what gets grown is something again that we're really grappling with at the state level. Now the last bullet, I actually think doesn't get as much attention as it deserves in the natural resources space. Generally, there's been a lot written about the shifting media landscape and what that means in terms of what content gets produced and how it gets viewed. When it comes to water or natural resources, we've seen the impacts of that shifting landscape firsthand to give a brief example within the conservation legislation that was passed last year. There was a standard as part of these budgets about 55 gallons per person per day for indoor use. Well, certain memes got out there in the social media space about, oh, the state's gonna put monitors on people's showers and limit people exactly to that and find them if they go over that 55 threshold that got picked up by certain national media and it created a whole set of waste of time for those of us who would have rather been working on implementation and now had to respond to erroneous media. So that's a growing challenge, I think that is worth noting. In the interest of time, I'm not gonna spend too much time on this slide other than to say we are still, I think, at a national level as well as in the realms of political science and other disciplines really still grappling with this which level of government is right for which type of tasks and the examples I'll give there. In California, we have a housing crisis. We have 12% of the nation's population, 25% of the nation's homeless population. We have nearly 40% of our population is unable to purchase a house and those numbers are getting worse as cost of living increases. Housing development has traditionally been a local decision. Now the state is stepping in and saying we need to have some oversight because we've got a crisis. That's creating a lot of conflict. On the other hand, when you look state federal, we've had this waiver from the federal government to set higher emission standards for vehicles for a long time. There's been a lot of benefit to that and of course now that is also a subject of intense debate. So the summary here is that we are not nearly putting anywhere near the amount of money we need to confront these big challenges and that's fundamentally a matter of political will and I would like to be cautiously optimistic. I'm a bit too much of a cynic for that but we do as a nation, as a federal society composed of the nation and the states need to really collectively step up. And of course, as I mentioned, equity is a big focus here and this picture really sort of encapsulates so much of what's been going on. So Sativa is a small water district in Compton, part of the greater LA area, whose board members were, in my view, criminally, at least if not civilly negligent in running their water system. The state came in last year and took over that water system. There's a tremendous amount of infrastructure, upgrades needed to bring it up to code and you've got a community that really doesn't have the capacity to pay for that. So how do we do it? There's my contact info and happy to take questions. Thank you. I think we have time for just one quick question and then we'll move on to the next. Yes, please, Nusia. Thank you, Max, for your presentation. I actually just want to go back to your comment about media. As you know, we did this whole study during the drought that showed that good media coverage of the drought really, really helped the state save a lot of water, despite actually sort of this dislike from the water utilities because of the drop in the revenue stream and all that. So I'm wondering, and you made this comment about, sometimes these wrong information gets into media and then obviously it gets propagated much faster because of access to social media. I wonder if you guys have internal strategies on how actually propagate the right set of information in a more strategic way through media rather to kind of get ahead of these comments or strategies. I would also make a final comment on the fact that San Francisco has 45 gallon per person per day water use. And actually this is very common in Europe as well. And no one has died because of it. So just to make that comment. So just on the media piece, I mean, we've been trying for years with our legislature to get more money broadly for external affairs and press management. And we're slowly getting there. And now we have people on staff who actually manage our social media accounts and really do try to get ahead of things. I think the other big challenge though is that there is a dwindling number of reporters who really have the capacity to take the time to understand this stuff. And this is complex work that we all do and finding someone who's willing to listen and then be able to articulate that, at least in print media in a way that is intelligible to the public. That's a vanishing skill and a big challenge as well. Sorry, I think we need to go on. So one more thanks. And we're going to move to... Tom Frazier, who is unfortunately not joining us in person, but is online. And I'm not quite sure. Are we going to get video or just... Let's start with audio. How's that? Yeah, yeah. Welcome. Yeah, we see your slides. Let's see if I can get a video, but it might be just as fine to do this. Let's go. Hold on. And Tom, I don't know if you've been able to hear. We're shooting for about 20 minutes with five minutes of questions. If we stick to that, we'll get done just at estimated time. Okay, I'll try to keep this on track here. So do you have video now and everything? We do. All right. So I apologize for the inconvenience. It was a long day yesterday. And good thing I'm not the chief technology officer because I'm challenged at the moment, but hopefully we'll make it work. So again, my name's Tom Frazier and I am the chief science officer for the state of Florida. And for those of you who know me in that room, I spent the first, I guess the last 30 years of my career in an academic arena. But it's a big change, but it's a really exciting time for the change, I guess. We've got an administration in Florida that's super, super progressive in my view, and they're ready to address the challenges, the many challenges that we have in the state with regard to water. We've got 22 million people by all accounts, Florida is a water state, but because of the population, the various industries in the state, we've got one of the largest tourism industries, one of the largest agricultural enterprises in the world. We've got water challenges and they're not a secret to anybody. So we're gonna kind of work through some slides. If we can go to the next slide. Okay, I'm gonna try to keep pace with these slides. Just give me a second and we'll all be on the same page. So we have a new governor just like California, right? And he essentially issued an executive order within the first couple days of office that focused very, very, very squarely on water related issues and water quality in particular. So it was through the legislative budget year, we were fortunate to get more than $625 million to address water related issues in the state. And I think we're being very aggressive with those dollars trying to make some progress. Next slide. So in that executive order, I mean, I said there's $625 million, there's certainly additional dollars in the budget for other water related issues, but these are the key ones. We've got about $400 million for Everglades restoration. I know Stephanie will be really excited to hear where we're going in that direction. We've got about $100 million for spring restoration, as well, $50 million for water quality improvements, $40 million for alternative water supply, and another $25 million to deal specifically with some of the harmful algal bloom issues in the state. I mean, again, the focus is on water quality and geographically, there's a large focus on the South Florida ecosystems, particularly Everglades restoration and to deal with some of the algae blooms that we have in the state, we clearly with regard to climate change and sea level rise, Florida is arguably ground zero for some of those issues. And so that's also a focal area for us. Although there's a tremendous focus in the South Florida ecosystems, it's not our focus, our work isn't completely narrow in that regard. We've got problems all around the state, particularly in Central and North Florida, and so we're dealing with those issues as well. With regard to the, I'm gonna speak to a few of these things in details we've moved forward, but one of the ones I wanted to just talk about now is regard to alternative water supply. And it's the first time that we've actually had funding for alternative water supply projects since 2008. So it's been more than a decade. And this is super critical for us because by 2035, our population's gonna swell to about 25 million and our water use is gonna increase by 20%. So alternative water supply projects that are super important to us and those include things like developing desalination opportunities. How do we deal with brackish and surface and groundwater sources? How do we create storage facilities, reclaimed water and stormwater reuse? So all of these things are good. There's a lot going on. Next slide. Okay, so I'm gonna go straight to, with regard to the big ticket items, Everglades restoration, and you see a couple of bullet points here and I'll just kind of talk about them for those of you that aren't familiar. We have a lot of water in Florida, sometimes not enough water. We're trying to get the water in the right places at the right time. In South Florida, that means that we need a lot of storage and we don't have enough at the moment. We also need a lot of treatment to go with that storage capacity. So part of the goal here moving forward is to acquire some of that storage, both East and West of Lake Okeechobee. We're committed to working with our partners and there's a lot of them in the South Florida to kind of help rehabilitate the Hoover Dike, which surrounds Lake Okeechobee. We're trying to focus on kind of renovating or fixing the Tamiami Trail lifting up the road so we can get more water into the National Park and into Biscayne Bay. North of the lake, we're trying to finish the Kissimmee River restoration project, also trying to authorize some storage and start a new reservoir in the Everglades agricultural area. So what does all this do? I think it's, excuse me, I think these efforts we're gonna help improve the health over more than 2 million acres in the South Florida ecosystem, including the parks I said before. Hopefully we'll be able to make some improvements in the quality and the water quality in Lake Okeechobee. That's a big concern for everybody in the state. In order, if we can do that, hopefully we'll be able to reduce some of the discharge, the damaging discharges, you know, both on the East and West coast of the state. Hopefully we'll be able to improve delivery of water, good clean water to Florida Bay and Biscayne Bay. And again, through these efforts to have some enhanced water supply and maintain our flood mitigation efforts, you know, with the core. So again, a lot going on, next slide. So this is not just a Florida effort. There's as many people in that room know, there's partners at the federal level and the state level, those include, you know, Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife Service, USGS, you know, National Park Service and at the state level, Water Management Districts, DEP, Department of Ag, all of the players that were mentioned similar in California. But it's a long-term process. But if you look at this particular slide, you can look at the kind of the yellow or the orange on the side, I don't expect you to read that. But what's encouraging about that is we've identified a large number of projects that are intended to help with the restoration effort. And if you, what is important about there, when you look at the construction completion dates, a lot of those are to be finished by 2022. So in the very near future, certainly within the term of this new administration. Next slide. So a couple of those projects that we will, are received funding for this year. The first one I would want to talk about is the C44 reservoir and the associated stormwater treatment area. For those of you who aren't familiar, this reservoir is on the east side of Lake Okeechobee. And again, it's the project is intended to create water storage as well as water treatment. It's currently under construction, but all the contracts have been issued and the construction's underway. We do expect this project to be completed by 2022. And the state should expect its part for the stormwater treatment area to be completed before that actually. The benefits of this particular project is that they're 60, about a little more than 60,000 acre feet of storage. And in the treatment area, you're gonna also remove a little more than 60,000 pounds of costs first annually. So the total cost of this project is about $750 million. And again, I'm happy to say that the states have already provided their portion of the funds for that. We go to the next slide. So on the other side of Lake Okeechobee on the west side, we have the C43 reservoir. And so that project is in a construction phase. We expect this contract to be awarded early this year. The timeframe for completion again is 2022. And this reservoir's a bit bigger, it's 170,000 acre feet of storage. It doesn't have the same type of stormwater, or excuse me, STA associated with it, but the way that it's constructed, there will be some foster removal about close to 20,000 pounds will be removed annually. So the cost of this reservoir is about $600 million. So I think people are understanding that the scale of these projects and the scale of the investment is rather large. Next slide. So another project that we received or contributed some funding to is Herbert Hoover Dyke. That's the earthen dam that surrounds Lake Okeechobee. And it's anticipated that it's will be completed this year, 2019. And we hope that the restoration, or excuse me, the rehabilitation will coincide with the revision of the Lake Okeechobee system operating manual, which used to be called LORS. So this is a big ticket item, man. It's been going for a long time. It's about $1.8 billion, but it's fully funded at this point with $100 million in state contributions. So again, this is one particular slide that, but it's 32 separate structures that needed to be visited as part of this restoration effort. So it's a big project. Next slide. So this is one as exciting too. Just two weeks ago, the governor announced that full funding had been secured to complete the project to elevate the Tamiami Trail. And by doing that, we're going to allow essentially, 75 to 80 billion gallons of water a year flow south into the Everglades and down into Florida Bay. So that's a huge achievement, something that's very exciting that just came out of the governor's office in the last couple of weeks. Go to the next slide. And again, just last week, this is even sooner, the South Florida Water Management District, who we work with on a regular basis, took the next steps in actually moving the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir project forward. So they've submitted applications to the Department of Environmental Protection and the Army Corps and for land clearing. And so this project is beginning in relatively short order. The intent of the project here again is to not only increase water storage capacity, but improve water quality. Again, taking some of the heat or stress off of the estuaries both to the east and west of Lake Bokeh-Chobee. It also allows us an opportunity to send more water south into the Everglades. So it's a big step forward in implementing the governor's executive order and focusing on water calling and just protecting our water resources here in the state of Florida. Next slide. Okay, so moving out of the Everglades, I mean, that's an iconic ecosystem clearly for our nation, but North Central Florida is also home to the largest concentration of springs, probably certainly in North American and arguably in the world, there's more than 700 of them. And in 2016, the Florida legislature identified 30 outstanding Florida springs. Most of these are first magnitude springs that require additional protection to conserve for conservation purposes and to ensure that they can be utilized and enjoyed by generations and years to come. So these, the water quality protections that we're moving forward with and are kind of carried out in restoration plans that we call BMAPS or Best Basin Management Action Plans. And these particular basin management action plans are focused on reducing nitrogen pollution in our groundwater, which ultimately serves as a point or a source of discharge for the spring systems and is presumably the largest culprit affecting water quality in these systems. The sources of nitrogen, they're the usual culprits, right? They can include wastewater, water from septic tanks, stormwater runoff, fertilizer from both urban and agricultural lands. So next slide. So this is arguably the biggest issue facing Florida right now and it's the harmful algal blooms, both blue-green algae blooms and our freshwater systems, particularly in South Florida and red tides and the coastal waters and Gulf. These aren't unique to Florida. Other states and the nation and certainly other countries around the world are seeing an increase in the prevalence of blue-green algae blooms. We're trying to tackle those head-on. We've got, I mean, as part of the governor's executive order, we put together a blue-green algae task force and hopefully that'll provide us an opportunity to help set priorities with some of the dollars that we have to spend on these algae-related problems. And also importantly that algae task forces provides an opportunity to insert some science into the policy management arena moving forward. So I'm really excited to be working with that group. One of your members, Wendy Graham, happens to be a member of that task force. So I get to see her on a regular basis. So that's good stuff for me. If we can go to the next slide. I've heard the folks from California mention communication is a big issue in messaging and it certainly is here in Florida as well. One of the things in my role as chief science officer, I'm actually putting together an office of environmental accountability and transparency. And we are working with a number of consultants to put together various websites. This is one of our websites, but it's important for us to be able to communicate with the public where the problem areas might be, what the level of risk might be, how we're addressing those problems and show that we're trying to be transparent in what we do and responsive to the requests that we get from the public. So that's a big issue for us. Next slide. Again, with regard to the blue green algae blooms, most of the problems are in South Florida. They originate in Lake Okeechobee, but I want to point out it's not the only place that we have blue green algae blooms. We have blue green algae blooms in some of the spring systems. We certainly have blue green algae blooms in the St. John Rivers on the northeast coast and other water bodies throughout the state. But for right now, a large lens is on the South Florida ecosystems and the way that we're dealing with them again, some of the driving forces of these algae blooms are not unexpectedly are nutrient driven. So we're trying to work on these problems through the basin management action plans. And we have three of them that are key right now. One of them is the Lake Okeechobee B-Map, which you see in green on that slide. The other two are the coastal basin management action plans, one for the Kalusa Hatchee on the west coast and the St. Lucie River Nestuary on the east coast. As part of that, part of our efforts, I guess, are tried to review and update these B-Maps. And by the end of this year, I think we're on a good pace to do that, both for the Kalusa Hatchee and St. Lucie and Lake Okeechobee is expected to be finished later, certainly before December 2019. We use the B-Maps to prioritize the types of projects that we're going to invest in that'll hopefully allow us to get the most bang for our buck with regard to nutrient reduction efforts. And again, the blue-green algae task force is gonna be invaluable in that regard, helping us use science to make the best decisions as we can with regard to those prioritization processes. Next slide. Whoops. So, you know, it seems like this is an important point to make. I mean, the nutrient algae problems are, they're big problems and they're not gonna go away tomorrow. We realize that you have to kind of keep your eye on the prize and we have to continue to implement a wide variety of projects to get the nutrient loading down. But that can, we realize it's gonna take many, many years to do that, but we're gonna try to compliment that long-term approach with a relatively more aggressive intervention strategy. So we have dollars in our budget to employ innovative technologies and we're actively seeking, you know, very creative solutions not only to deal with the potential problem right up front. You know, how do we use technologies to reduce nutrients before they get to cause a problem? How do we use technologies to contain blooms? Or how do we use those type of technologies or innovative technologies to contain them or mitigate the damage that they might have caused? So this is just an example here. We have lots of canals in our South Florida ecosystems. And they can cause lots of problems, right? Not just a nuisance odors, they can be toxic. As most people know, that's becoming a bigger issue and we have to coordinate obviously with the Department of Health and our other agencies in the state like the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission not only to address those problems but to message them effectively, right? So next slide. So kind of moving out of the obvious water quality arena, there is a big focus again on coastal resilience. As I said before, Florida's ground zero for sea level rise. We know that, right? And I think the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is committed to kind of marshaling the resources that we need to prepare Florida's coastal communities to deal with the effects of climate change. We're in the process now of hiring a new chief resilience officer to deal with some of these issues. But they're complex and multifaceted. There's certainly impacts of sea level rise that require modifications of the built environment and modifications of infrastructure. But clearly there's impacts on natural systems. And in the Department of Environmental Protection, we're keenly aware of that. We have an office of resilience and coastal protection that manages more than 4.5 million acres of submerged lands. And the focus in that regard, I guess, is really on the structural habitats. Those are things like coral reefs, seagrasses, oysters, marsh and mangrove systems that provide a barrier of defense against storm surges and things of that nature. So as many people are aware, also in the Florida Keys, we have the only barrier of reach system in North America and in the US, it's in a degraded state. And we're trying to fix that right now in large part because there's water quality issues that we have to deal with in disease issues. But we're focused on that. And again, in the executive order, it wasn't all about lakes and harmful algae blooms. We've allocated several million dollars to deal with coral restoration and remediation efforts there as well. So a lot going on. It's a good time. If we go to the next slide. Maybe we are done. OK, excellent. Yeah, I'm good. Are we on schedule? Spot on. Yes, thank you very much. All right. Great. Yeah, thanks a lot. I think we have time for a question or two. And Nusha is quick to the draw again. Man, she's good. And all that's waiting. No, no, please go ahead. Tom, thank you so much for your presentation. I have sort of two questions for you. One is, I didn't hear anything about water use, sort of control, conservation, and efficiency in your sort of alternative water supply strategies, which made me wonder if I know there's some efforts going on, but I wonder how much emphasis is put on that before building all sort of engineered solutions. The second was, as you talk about coastal resiliency, obviously, as you know, there's so much opportunity in these multi-benefit solutions that can deal with water quality and coastal resiliency and potentially some water supply in a sense that the less sea water intrusion you have, the more water you have to use. Also, some of that can help with stuff like horizontal levees and some of those solutions that can have multi-benefits. I wonder if you can touch on those two issues a little bit. Yeah, so I mean, again, there's so many things that we have to deal with in Florida with regard to water and I was trying to keep it to 15 minutes and try to emphasize and focus on some of the things that are priorities, I mean, obvious priorities for us in a very, very short term. But it doesn't mean that we've neglected alternative water supply. It's a big issue for us, right? Particularly with regard to conservation and reuse types of things. But there are often some challenges there, right? And sometimes when there are competing issues, sometimes when you conserve water, sometimes you concentrate potential pollutants and you have to be careful where that water goes or you might exacerbate a water quality problem. So those are things that we're learning to deal with. And but again, I think that alternative water supply is certainly on our radar. And as I said before, there's all kinds of opportunities to pay attention to and we're doing that. And so I don't want you to think that we're ignoring that. And with regard to the coastal resiliency question, same type of thing. All of the efforts to improve water quality will ultimately hopefully yield some benefits for those habitats that are offshore that provide tremendous ecosystem services, particularly with regard to things like combating sea level rise or more intense storms or an increased frequency of storms. So you're right on both accounts. I mean, they're part of our portfolio of things. And we're not ignoring them. They're everywhere. Great. Thank you very much. I think we need to move on to the next speaker. We started in California. We are in Florida. And now we move to the local area of Maryland. We're in the state of Maryland. Thank you. We're in the state of Maryland. I think I had the best commute of all the speakers. Sorry guys. Good morning. My name is Suzanne Dorsey. I'm the assistant secretary at the Maryland Department of the Environment. And on behalf of Ben Grumbel, our secretary, thank you. It's such a privilege to be here. I am the token scientist in the office of the secretary. My background really started out with sort of biophysical coupling. And my career has spanned coastal North Carolina down into the Caribbean and offshore, a lot of oceanography work. But I've always been fascinated about why or maybe why, more importantly, why not? Why don't decision makers use science to address their problems? And so that's been sort of a key theme of my career is, wow, we've got these great USGS programs and NOAA programs, increasingly sophisticated scientific tools. And yet some of us are still working on outdated decision frameworks that are based on competing needs, who you know, where the money is, who's in the administration. It's frustrating. So as I looked at what the goals of this workshop was, really trying to use these tools, doing the good work of science, bringing sophisticated tools to the decision-making framework, I thought I would sort of try to give you three take-home observations that I have, three take-home needs. And I think each one, none of them are unique. I think that we've touched on each of them, and I suspect they'll come up again in the game. But at the Maryland Department of the Environment, we have a mission to protect and restore the environment for the health and well-being of all Marylanders. And really, we work in a larger framework, we're a small state, but we work collaboratively with our neighbors in a lot of areas. As I work in the state of Maryland, I find that there's three key areas that we need support. One is the analysis of risk, a really excellent vulnerability index, and really educating decision-makers about what risk management is, and what risk analysis is, and honestly, what it's not, and understanding the difference between that black swan event, in addition to the high-risk, high-probability vulnerability areas that really need to be assessed. That needs to be, and you're going to hear this word a lot, that needs to be integrated. So it can't just be one-dimensional. It can't just be water supply. We don't look at things in a one-dimensional framework anymore. So the second area, the second theme that I really want to emphasize is decision framework. Again, objective, data-driven decision framework. I live in the city of Annapolis, and historic place. My family goes back 13 generations there. It's deeply meaningful if you're from Maryland, even if you're from the United States, has important historic relevance. We have the Naval Academy there. We have coastal flooding, right? Sea level rise, we have coastal flooding, almost monthly coastal flooding. So the long-term plans for the city of Annapolis is, well, we're going to put up a sea wall. Okay, that's fair. So reasonable approach, except for that, the Naval Academy, DOD, is putting up a three-foot sea wall, and the city of Annapolis wants to put up a four-foot wall. What are you talking about? It's competing needs. Well, the Navy isn't going to talk to the city, and the city isn't, even if they talk to each other, we're going to do what we're going to do. So how do we help these communities make good decisions? Let's have a framework for decision-making. A lot of our local, even our state agencies, don't have excellent decision-making tools. Finally, we're talking multi-billion-dollar investment, particularly when it comes to infrastructure change, and you've seen multi-million dollars of investments here. We're talking, Governor Hogan has put five billion just in our Test Big Bay Restoration Program. If we are investing multi-billion dollars, we need multiple benefits. We cannot just focus on water supply, water quality. It's got to be storm management, flood mitigation. It's got to be all of the above. So I'm a child of the space race. My dad was an aeronautical engineer. So think about Sputnik. We invested, the Russians invested a lot of money, did one thing, I think it beeped, right? Which is impressive. I mean, it was impressive. Now the ISS, it doesn't do one thing. It does multiple things. We've got to think about, we need solutions, and we need scientists to integrate solutions to optimize outcomes. It can't be one thing. It must be multiple things. So those are my take-home messages. From Sputnik to the ISS, we've got to be thinking about how we make wise investments with public funds. So I'll give you a couple of frames. First of all, in Maryland, almost everything we do at the department in the state is framed by two driving issues, the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Program. I couldn't be prouder. I left the state 25 some years ago. I worked in the bay, spending 48 hour cruises in the Chesapeake Bay, pulling up 300 gallons of jellyfish, looking at how they impacted fisheries. The bay was in decline, massive dead zones. We had switched from a keystone species of the oysters to these jellyfish species. I come back, the bay has turned a corner. Now all of my good technical people in the Chesapeake Bay region, y'all don't take a minute to realize the incredible success that defines the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Program. We've had more SAV restoration in the state. We've had fewer dead zones. I think we're predicted to have a pretty big one this year because of all the rainfall. But a couple of years back, we had zero dead zones. More fish, more crabs, all of our indicators are showing recovery. So we may be reaching a stable state which allows us to manage and ensure that this bay continues to recover and be healthy and vibrant and add to our economy. It's incredible. How do we get there? Of course, a foundation of science. Incredible, a set in science and technical advisory committees. Incredible mental intellectual resources have driven tools that we implement to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. But the real innovation, I'm sorry, I'm a scientist. I'm sorry to say this. Again, how do we make decisions? How do we get things done? The real innovation, human-to-human connectivity, the complex, messy dynamic challenge of maintaining relations. This is a multi-jurisdictional effort from New York to Virginia. We are all trying to work together with the support of the EPA, a federal agency to help us enforce a total maximum daily load and clean up our streams and our byways. When you go to Western Maryland or West Virginia or Pennsylvania, they don't care about the Chesapeake Bay. I might, I live there. But folks in Western Maryland need to have a rationale for supporting the Chesapeake Bay. You need to talk to them as human beings and ask them what matters to them, stream temperature matters to them, making sure that the trout population is restoring and that they can have a green economy. That matters. That's the decision frame for them, flooding matters to them. So how do you solve those problems that are locally relevant and get a clean bay out of it as a co-benefit? So again, having a focus, not just on a one-dimensional challenge, but really looking at it from the local relevance, local priorities, scaling up to the impact on the Chesapeake Bay, that integrated approach is what we need. That's what we've been successful with. And then managing those relationships. There are some communities that don't tread on me, communities. They don't like the state government. They definitely don't like the federal government. But often they have local problems that can be resolved and access to federal or state funds is a benefit. So let's say you've got a church parking lot that floods all the time and we can help restore that creek and address that flooding issue. So how do you work with that group to make that a reality? Sometimes we don't talk about the Chesapeake Bay. We don't talk necessarily, we work with local staff members. So those relationships, again, I can't emphasize enough. So the other frame that really defines a lot of what we do in the state of Maryland, particularly at the Maryland Department of the Environment is our secretaries, the chair of the Maryland Climate Commission. And we have some ambitious goals. In 2009, we adopted the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act. California, I'm sure it's not as impressive as yours, but also very regional. We are not big enough to do anything alone. So there are a lot of regional connections here. So in 2015, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Plan Update found that like California were on target to meet our emissions reduction, we've estimated an economic benefit of between $2.5 and $3.5 billion by 2020. We've created between 26 and 33,000 new jobs in our little tiny state. So again, this green investment is measured in terms of dollars and jobs. Why? That's what decision makers care about. In 2015, Governor Hogan signed an updated version and increasing a benchmark requiring a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas remissions from the 2006 level by 2030. So we can't just focus on the Chesapeake Bay. We can't just focus on local flooding. We've got to integrate all of these. So we looking forward, integration is a key part. So we do look at water in MDE as a one-water integrated approach, but we've really got to think about where the decisions are made that are most influential. So when I came to Maryland, one of the questions I had was saltwater intrusion. I was working with the agricultural groups and I saw some of our NGOs saying, what is the impact of agricultural irrigation on saltwater intrusion in the state of Maryland? And I said, that's a great question, but you're not finished. What about residential use and what about industrial use? No, no, we don't care about that. We wanna know what ag, big bad ag is doing to our aquifers. You're setting up a dispute there. And what I know with saltwater intrusion is that the solution is integrated. It involves water conservation in industry. It involves potentially ag taking high quality waste treated wastewater and using that for irrigation. So if we pit these entities against each other, we're gonna fail immediately. We're gonna fail. And that's a long-term failure because as soon as those relationships are set up in a negative standpoint, it's really hard to get folks back together again. So according to a draft saltwater intrusion plan, we don't know really what saltwater intrusion is in the state of Maryland. We know about inundation, we know we're gonna lose 20,000 acres of farmland and forest land on the eastern shore of Maryland. But we don't really know what the state of our aquifers are. So we're lacking a comprehensive plan for saltwater intrusion. We know that our nutrient management plans for all of our farmers, we have some of the most most impressive farmers in the nation. Proportion, we don't have the most farmers. Let me be clear. But proportionately, more of our farmers practice conservation farming. That is they use cover crops, they use no-till. They're very focused on nutrient management. And they have more best management practices implemented than anywhere else in the nation and then most places in the world. So our farmers are required to meet very strict nutrient management plans. You put salt in that groundwater and it changes everything. The chemistry shifts radically. So we need an integrated plan that considers how saltwater intrusion it affects the water quality, but also our nutrient management strategy. Can't just be one. So we need analysis of the risk, a decision framework. Hey, let's not just attack this with ag. Let's make sure we bring in our business partners. Let's bring in the state and the residential water use and make sure that we have an integrated approach and approach that really involves both or all three sectors and ask them to step up to the plate and work collaboratively. What I need from science is that integrated optimized solution, a focus on the solution. We'll get the relationships, but we need a focus on that optimized solution. And it needs to expand outside of just physical science or chemistry. Like those of us that are working in the decision framework, I think science really needs to think about how all of these different economic inputs, demographic inputs, equity, all the things that you've heard, you've got to be thinking about that in terms of your hard science as well. So there's a lot of questions with our saltwater intrusion. The good news is I think Texas and California, Louisiana, y'all are way ahead of us. The solutions are out there. Figuring out how to optimize those solutions for the state of Maryland with our other priorities, that's what we need support from. That's where we need help. So the next issue I want to talk about, I'm trying to keep us on time here, is stormwater management. So stormwater management is another area. The Chesapeake Bay program, we got a lot of criticism based around the fact that we do annual practices to address our nutrient management. So our environmental critiques, and the right, we saw a lot of nutrient management problems with annual practices. Our cover crop practice is an annual practice. It sucks up the excess nitrogen from our fields every winter. It's very successful. Relatively speaking, in the context of nutrient management, it's extremely cheap. We invest in it more than any other state in the nation, and it works, but it's not permanent. If we pull that money, that benefit goes away. So there's a lot of push to invest in large scale infrastructure changes. Remember, most of our infrastructure was built way before we had stormwater management regulation. So what do we do? How do we address this? We need hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure change. It cannot be Sputnik. It cannot just be around water quality management. It has to be based around some of our climate change goals. It has to be based around human safety, well high capacity, well building, housing, social equity. It's gotta be optimized for multiple benefits. And we need you to help us really think about that from a systems perspective. Our regulators work in a very narrow frame. It is difficult for them to think about things outside of their frame. So how do we help craft solutions that get us to a place where multi-billion dollar investments, let's say in the city of Baltimore makes sense? How do we not only deal with our nutrients, but also bring in our toxins? It's gotta be both, and it's gotta be at the same time. And if we're going to invest in large scale infrastructure, we need the international space station. We need it to do more than one thing. So we expect to spend, and the stormwater management is really interesting. We basically ask all of our high density areas to get rid of impervious surface, to restore impervious surface 20%. We've invested, our permittees have invested 1.5 billion dollars so far to restore impervious surface. It's one thing, right? There's several different practices that get us there, stream management, but there's also annual practice. We do street sweeping in Baltimore. And if you've been to Baltimore recently, we're happy about them doing street sweeping. It's about all they can manage. Are we on the right track? Are we spending our money in this restoration of impervious surface on the right areas? Is there a better way that we can get to where we wanna be with flood mitigation, nutrient management? Spend our resources more wisely. Where should we do stream restoration? Looks like the headwaters is a much better investment than farther down. So those are questions that a lot that we're seeking to optimize the outcomes to manage multiple benefits. So I'll end where I started that we need this vulnerability index to say, hey, you better start here. We need to get out of our framework of competing needs and competing power structures and really focus our decision matrix on areas that represent the highest risk to the wellbeing, the lifestyle, the economic viability of our state. We need to make sure that if we invest in large scale infrastructure that we have access to amenities, improved access to reasonable housing and improved water quality and managing water quantity. We need to decrease the nutrients getting to the bay. We need to decrease our sediments getting to the bay. We need to decrease the risk of life. I don't know if those of you that are from this area will know that Ellicott City is a little mill town just nestled in between sort of a high topography area that's been highly developed. And they had 2,000 year floods within two years. I recently was at a meeting where a scientist came in and said, you know, we've reanalyzed the risk for Ellicott City to flood. And instead of 1,000 year, those floods are no longer 1,000 year floods. There are 132 year floods. That doesn't mean anything to our decision makers. How you phrase that is critical to what decisions are made. We're starting to get a handle on the state of Maryland that post-crisis planning is generally very poor planning. If you look at Ellicott City was at 1.2 billion, I think we are to fix the problem. If we had fixed it before with managing our development, it would have been a lot cheaper. So we're starting to get a handle on what these things mean. But as a scientific community, don't talk to my treasurer about 132 year risk. It doesn't mean anything to her. Talk about vulnerability priorities. Do not come to state government with a 42 priority list. 42, you know, issues that need to be addressed. Can't take that all in. Start with at the top three, start working your way down. So think about how human beings make decisions. Understand that it is the complexity of those relationships, those relationships that form and break and reform. Generally the bluntest tools that governments have are litigation and regulation. They tend to hurt relationships rather than help relationships. But how can we build relationships and find solutions that address multiple issues? So hopefully I didn't take too long. I tried to scale it down a little bit, but I'm happy to take questions if we have time. Thank you very much. So I think we do have time for one, maybe two questions. All right. Keep it on track. All right. Everyone's getting hungry, I think. John, we now circle back to the great state of Texas. Okay. All right, so I'm in the unenviable position of standing between you and lunch. So I'll keep us moving right along. So when I got the call to give this talk, I'm a geologist. And right now our agency is consumed with the new initiative to set up a statewide flood planning process, including an appropriations of $1.6 billion. And so when I took this job, we were primarily water supply planners planning for drought or record. And so my talk is going to be in the context of water supply projects. But since then, excuse the pun, we've been inundated with working on these flood issues. I know apologies for that. But that's been our primary focus is working on flood issues. As a geologist, I don't get to talk about groundwater anymore. So I'm really excited to be able to give you this talk and focus in on some of the future groundwater challenges that are facing my state. And so when I thought about how to organize this talk, excuse me, it was so daunting to try to condense it all down into a digestible form. So my geology brain kicked in. I said, let's just walk through it stratigraphically. And so yes, in fact, this is how I've organized this. And is it, how do I drive? Okay, there it is. Yeah, stratigraphically, we'll walk through some of the issues starting in the shallow subsurface and move all the way down to depth. I'm gonna give you a quick overview so you understand sort of the groundwater situation in Texas and some of the terms because I'm gonna refer to them. Also move down into the problem of surface groundwater interaction. Move further down into the freshwater aquifers and they're diminishing availability over time. And then look at the prospect of the brackish aquifers as a future water supply source for our state. And then look at the problem of deep water, deep well injection of produce water from the oil and gas industry and how that interfaces with these brackish waters. A real challenge for us. So just give you a quick overview. We're blessed with tremendous groundwater resources in Texas, nine major aquifers here on the left, 22 minor aquifers on the right, all total about 12 million acre feet of water available from these aquifer systems. So in terms of the use of groundwater in Texas, it's the dominant source of supply at present with over 60% of all water being supplied by groundwater. And then the real dominant user here is the agricultural industry, which uses 75% of that water. And it's primarily in these blue counties. This is where the dominant groundwater counties and this is where all the area of gated agriculture is principally up here in the high plains in Texas and then also out here in the hinterlands of Texas. So really important for agricultural purposes. Most of the state relies on surface water for public water supply, but 28% is provided for that. Interesting statistic though is 99% of all rural citizens rely on groundwater for their supplies. So if you live away from a utility, it's likely you have a private well as your principal source of groundwater or of water. Okay, a little bit about the Texas Water Law. We're a unique in a lot of ways in that our fundamental doctrine, water doctrine is the rule of capture. This is established by a court case, common law case back in 1904, where a landowner was adjacent to next to a railroad company that drilled a big well and effectively that well drained his well from pumping. It was taken all the way up through the courts and the courts and their infinite wisdom concluded at the bottom that basically this is paraphrasing here that groundwater is so secret, occult and concealed that it's practically impossible to manage. So they kind of just threw their hands up there. Also another quote, this is more recent. There's a great book by a Seamus McGraw called Thirsty Land. It's all about Texas Water and some of our challenges, but this is a quote from one of the attorneys. This is another summary of Texas Water Law. If I'm pumping in its mine, if you're pumping in its ours and if it's polluted well, then it's yours. And that's kind of it in a nutshell, but rule of capture is certainly consistent with the first one. It really is pumped as much as you want with little consequence provided it's not malicious, causes subsidence or it's wasteful. So that is the law of the land, but the rule of capture has been modified with the establishment of local controlled districts who want groundwater conservation districts. Where there is a groundwater conservation district, they have the ability to impose curtailments, pumping restrictions, well-spacing, they can manage groundwater. So we've evolved the way from groundwater from rule of capture, where you have, if you're a part of this crazy quill of districts that currently exist in the state. So to decentralize method of management is established by statute as the preferred method of management. And it is the only means of modifying the rule of capture at Texas. So I also wanna talk a little bit about the groundwater planning process. You notice that all these districts are spread out across the entire state. They don't align with the offer that generally shaped like a county to sort of reconcile that separation we've created these groundwater management areas in which all the districts located within one of these 16 groundwater management areas has to collectively get together and decide what is their future policy? What are they gonna collectively manage towards by determining what's called a desired future condition? I'm gonna refer back to this later. And this sets a quantifiable condition of the aquifer that they all intend to manage towards. And so in a shotgun wedding of policy and science, that policy statement is handed to our agency and we apply our groundwater availability models to determine how much pumping could be afforded to preserve that condition. So this is effectively the means of determining availability. And within my agency we own and operate all the groundwater availability models we maintain them and we maintain them for this specific purpose of supporting this process. Then ultimately that availability number gets fed up into the state water plan into the districts where they use to manage. So all that is just context to set up these challenges I wanna describe to you. And we'll start here in the shallow subsurface with the interaction of surface and groundwater. So excuse this crude cartoon here but it describes it pretty well. It's the only one I could find but it really shapes up what's going on the circumstance because here in Texas, another kooky aspect of our law is that we bifurcated the waters. Surface water in the state of Texas is considered public water. Water managed by the state. You have to go to a centralized agency, TCQ to get a water rights for diversion of surface water supplies. Groundwater on the other hand is managed decentrally by the local districts and it's considered a private property. So very different things. We've taken the hydrogeologic cycle and we've severed it, we bifurcated it and we've created the circumstance where this interface right here is this unknown place. We don't know what to deal, how to deal with it and we're not sure what to do when you get induced flow coming from pumping just adjacent to a river system. It's creating a real problem for us and it's going to continue to be a struggle. Oftentimes our agency is called on to help inform this problem. Here a few years ago, legislation was passed that tasked our agency with conducting a study of all the aquifers in Texas and quantifying what the volume was of the surface water streams that were sourced from groundwater. And likewise, how much of the surface water streams were contributing or how many of what proportion of the aquifers were contributing to surface water. We conducted that study. We literally had about six months to do it so we had to look at it from a real high level view but we're able to look at, take the USGS, thank you, Base Flow Indices and apply that to the reaches of the stream that cross over the outcrop of the aquifers and then come up with an estimate of how much of the water was being contributed by the aquifers. And so here are the results. I mean, the takeaway here is that all the river systems owes the supplies on some level to groundwater. And here are the ranges. On average, it's about 30% of all surface water is sourced from groundwater. So it's what we already sort of knew. We were just able to quantify it in some sense that this is an interactive system and to separate them legally has graded some real complications. And so the actual on the ground problems are starting to emerge where you have some river systems that have substantial groundwater development in the alluvium adjacent to them that are starting to impact water rights downstream. And in particular, the San Sabra River, this is normally a perennially flowing river. Before this wet stage that we've experienced since about 2015, we were into extreme drought period. And this was this part of the river that had never gone dry before was dry. And the downstream interest that we're relying on these water rights were pointing to the upstream agricultural community. And in fact, there'd been a lot of well development in the area. But again, we weren't real sure what to call it. Surface water, groundwater, how to reconcile it. Good news is it rained and we went on, we started thinking about something else for a while. This is also a problem down here in Valverde County. This is the Devil's River, beautiful river system out there in the wilds of Texas. It's all sourced completely by groundwater. I'm gonna, this is gonna be my case study for this afternoon. It's fascinating, complicated hydrology and hydrogeology. But this is also a problem in terms of groundwater affecting surface water flows out there. So the challenges, again, we've got that poorly defined interface of surface water and groundwater. As a policy goal, most of the offers have to accept some sort of level of managed decline over time. So with managed decline, you're gonna have, you're gonna further impact the base flows to the surface streams. It's also gonna affect some of our environmental flow standards that we've established for the state and in some cases endangered species habitat for water dependent species. So the solutions, I mentioned we have groundwater availability models at my agency. They were, their regional models that used to determine availability. They're not fine enough scale to be able to measure or simulate what happens at that interface that really shall interface. So they're too coarse for that, which is a problem. In terms of solutions, science, we need more of it. We need more data. We need more technical tools to really inform the issue. And particularly we need to reduce the vertical resolution of these GAMs to really be able to measure that interface. More field data, ideally from co-located monitor wells and stream gauges so that we can correlate those relationships. And then we need a better quantify bank storage. We know we calculate rainfall runoff. We can calculate contributions to base flow from aquifers. We don't really have a good sense of what that bank storage is. Okay, moving on into the subsurface, I'm gonna talk about the freshwater aquifers in Texas. So this is a graph from our state water plan that shows the future availability over a 50 year period of groundwater in terms of providing our long-term supply. I mentioned that we're at about 12 million acre feet of available supply at present. Most of that is coming from, half of it is coming from the high plains, Oglala aquifer system, and then the Gulf Coast aquifer system. As a practical matter, high plains doesn't really recharge much. So all the irrigated agriculture is effectively mining, slowly mining that aquifer over time such that they've had to accept managed depletion as a managed strategy. So those supplies are gonna diminish over time and over here, overproduction has caused a substantial subsidence problem. So they've really had to cut back on production to make sure to mitigate for subsidence. All in all, that creates about a 24% decline in available water supplies over the 50 year horizon. So that's a real issue. And just to illustrate this to you, I mentioned desired future conditions or DFCs, that's these policy goals. I wanted to plot up a couple of them just to illustrate that in fact, most of these aquifers are managed for some level of acceptable decline. This is a Creso aquifer system, it's a deeply confined unit. So this is principally reductions in artesian pressure, but upwards of 100 feet over 50 years is what they've accepted that they have to manage towards. Then up here, this is a unconfined aquifer system, but again doesn't recharge much. So managed decline or some percent of saturated thickness remaining over time is the policy goal. So what do we do? How do we replace this diminishing supply over time? This is a pie chart of the current state water plan and all the strategies that we have in place to provide for that 50 year demand. Where as of now, brackish groundwater desalination is really only a very small component of that. But we've been doing a lot of work on characterizing these aquifers and I feel like it's got much more potential. So let's move down into the brackish. So we keep going down, there's a trend here. We're moving down into the brackish aquifers to talk about the availability of that as a future water supply. Back in 2003, we conducted an estimate of the overall supplies of brackish groundwater within Texas. We estimated 2.7 billion acre feet of brackish groundwater. Now compare that to available fresh water supplies of about 12 million acre feet. So tremendous resource and potential here. And we're really focusing in on this zone here between a thousand and 10,000 TDS. We feel like that that's sort of the low hanging fruit in the next level in terms of where future supplies can come from. Within our agency, right after the study came out, we were appropriated funding to set up a program called the BRAX program, Brackish Resource Offer Characterization System that was really focusing on two things, characterizing broadly the extent of these brackish groundwater resources. And these are some of the studies that we've completed. But then also we've been tasked more recently to narrow in on what are called brackish groundwater production zones. And the statute established certain criteria to where we're to designate what I call the sweet spots. Zones within those offers that the highest potential for future supply and the lowest risk of negative impacts. So we've conducted studies on about eight of those offers and designated zones. And they're very, very limited. I'm gonna focus in on the CRESO and the Gulf Coast Offer system of these entire systems. These are the only areas that we were able to designate zones and here's why. This last criteria, which is intended to avoid any negative impacts, it precludes us from designating a zone where you have wastewater injection, particularly from oil and gas waste. You know anything about Texas? We've got the oil and gas industry is booming. It has been for a hundred years or more. And so this is creating a real problem that we really didn't realize until we dug into this. And so what we're hoping to find is that if we narrowed in on this zone, 3000 to 10,000, what the EPA designates as a USDW, Underground Source of Drinking Water, that that would be the sweet spot and the injection would be limited to these lower zones of higher salinity. What we're actually finding, and this is a couple of figures from some of our BRAX reports, that historical wastewater disposal has actually been injecting into these USDWs or just below them, such in areas where there's not enough hydrogeological separation to prevent upward movement of that inject date. And so we've conservatively buffered all these old injection wells. These are all three to 10,000 TDSUSDWs, but we conservatively buffered them with the 15 mile buffers to make sure that projects don't go in with the potential of producing inject date over time. And it really limits dramatically the production potential from these aquifers. This is the Carisa Wilcox. It sits right underneath the Eagle Ford shale play, or sorry, Atopit, which is a really productive area within Texas. And this is the Gulf Coast aquifer system. And you can also see where we've had to buffer all these injections well. So substantially, potentially limits that resource. And then finally, that's the limits of the existing injection wells. Going forward, what concerns me is if we're looking to these brackish resource, brackish aquifers for a future water supply, the amount of oil and gas production is really just ramping up. It's a tremendous amount of current production. U.S. is the world leader in oil and gas production. Texas produces about 40% of the U.S.'s supply of oil and gas. And namely out here in the middle in the Permian Basin, the Barnett shale, and then the Eagle Ford shale. With the development of these unconventional reservoirs, estimates are that we're producing about 10 barrels of produce water for every barrel of oil. What are you gonna do with all this water? It's a tremendous challenge and a big problem. Right now, the cheapest source is the way to do it is to inject it into the ground. So the problem, excuse my crude cartoon here, but here's the problem is that if you inject too deep, get close to the basement rocks, and Oklahoma's experienced this, you have induced seismicity. If you come up a little shallower, well, you're coming up against these brackish water resources that could potentially be future supply. This is what keeps me up at night. How are we going to manage this amount of water? One solution is to reuse it all for hydrologic fracking demand, but some estimates coming out of the Delaware Basin is that there's a four to one ratio of produce water versus demand. So even if you used all of it, you still have a tremendous amount of water you gotta deal with. So it's a challenge or an opportunity. This is really high-sailing stuff, by the way. Some of it, 100,000 TDS with all the other constituents. It's a cost-effective to treat it and reuse it. Right now it's not, but if we're gonna continue to develop the energy sector out here, that's gonna be a real challenge. I think I've probably already gone through long, so I'll just sum up here. Future challenges, trying to navigate and reconcile that legal separation between surface water and groundwater. Our freshwater aquifers are completely subscribed. So how do we reconcile our future water supply issues? I think brackish aquifers are really the key. However, there's a real potential that we're compromising some of that resource with this issue of how we manage produced water over time. So that's all I have. I'll try to answer the questions. Have any? Everybody hungry? Excellent. Well, we definitely have some time for questions. Hey, was there, oh, I'm sorry. The Water Science and Technology Board has been involved. Well, WSTB's been involved in a series of studies and providing advice for the Edwards Aquifer District. How unusual is that kind of, that level of organization and collaboration among the various aquifer districts you had on your map up there? Is that something that's growing, that kind of cooperation, collaboration? Well, to be honest, it's been forced upon them because we've got these groundwater management areas that I showed you, the 16. Those groundwater management areas are configured like the major aquifer systems. So they have to come together and decide collectively on what their common goals are to be. And so there's more pressure from the legislature to better align how they manage to create more regulatory certainty anytime there's any sort of disparate management or disparate management approach among adjacent districts. They're really feeling a lot of pressure to get those aligned. So you're seeing more cooperation and the districts are ahead of it, they know it. They're going to be compelled to do that, but much of it is happening on a voluntary basis. Great, Kay, go ahead. Yeah, two questions. The first one was just how much interest, I don't know enough about your aquifers, but how much interstate cooperation are you getting with the joining states? And my second question is, how do you sleep at night? Yeah, I sleep okay. There's a lot to think about, but there's plenty of work, that's for sure. Turn of interstate cooperation. You know, the biggest transboundary aquifer in terms of interstate aquifers is the Ogallala aquifer up in the High Plains. It goes all the way up to Nebraska and then into New Mexico. And to be quite honest, there's not a lot of coordination. In fact, it's created some issues between New Mexico and Texas, where New Mexico's really scaling back. Groundwater over in the Ogallala has really not managed to much and at least not beyond the rule capture really. In fact, they've accepted that they're going to mine the offer by 50% over 50 years. So not much coordination up there. Most of the other aquifers are effectively mostly contained within Texas. That's a good thing about being really big. We have most of them in our boundaries. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. I'm in Grief India from the National Science Foundation. You showed a graph that I believe was showing a decreasing availability of groundwater through time. And I think this is what the graph was about. So the question I have is this due to recharge deficit or is it because an increased use and constant recharge or a combination of both? So of that 12 million acre feet of availability that I showed up there, half of that comes from the Ogallala aquifer up in the high plains and the Gulf Coastal aquifer systems. So up in the high plains aquifer, it really is a recharge deficit. They don't receive much recharge at all. There's a lot of water and storage in those sands. It's an unconfined aquifer. And so to support irrigated agriculture again, they've had to manage, they've had to accept that the best they can do is manage towards keeping 50% of the saturated thickness in place over 50 years. So that's going to diminish over time which explains some of the graph going down and to the right. The Gulf Coastal aquifer is experiencing subsidence due to overproduction. So they have to plan also for reducing production over time to mitigate for subsidence. So between those two primary aquifers making up 50% of the total supply and those issues that are really going to curtail production in the future, that's really where that's coming from. Everybody hungry? Okay. Thank you for your presentation. I was wondering, I mean, I wasn't 100% sure if you are looking at water quality and content with water quantity. There was a lot of commission on water quantity. So I would like for you to sort of make some comments on how the water quality generally is throughout the Texas. And one other question is you mentioned 99% of your rural communities depend on private wells. And I was wondering- On groundwater. I'm sorry? On groundwater. On groundwater, sorry. And I was wondering how the current oil and gas production is impacting water quality in those communities and do you have any sense of what's going on there? Right. So you're exactly right. It was focusing more in on the water quantity sides of things. That's principally what our agency is focused on is water supply planning for drought or record. And now we're flood planners. That's new. But the TCQ Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, they do most of the work on the water, on the water quality side of things. We do have a network of wells that we sample every year, but it's mainly for natural constituents. We're not looking at organics or contaminants or any of those kinds of things. That's what TCQ, they are, sister agency really looks at that. Railroad Commission, though even though they're all a name, they manage the oil and gas industry. They don't have anything to do with railroads, by the way. It's some artifact, it's weird, but they manage the oil and gas industry and most of the production is happening really, really deep in the subsurface. So there's not much of an effect associated with that or the fracking in terms of quality for the shallow domestic wells where you can see an impact at the shallow levels from brine pits that might not be properly lined or that are leaking. So that can be an issue. Is there a sense that that's happening or is it like they're 100% sure it's the fracking and the production is not impacting water quality? But there's one thing that you don't have the data if you're not looking for it. Like you assume it's not there. The second thing is you are looking for it and it's not impacting water quality. Yeah, the Railroad Commission, they do their best. You know, they're a small agency and it's a big industry. They've got most of the information that is submitted and water quality is self-reported by the industry. But typically if a adjacent landowner has a domestic well that they feel like they've been compromised, they'll typically report that. We don't really see a whole lot of that. Most of it is, if they're complaining about anything, it's damage to the roads or the smells and the nuisance conditions. That's really more of the dominant complaint. But hydrologic fracking at deep in the subsurface really is probably not the bigger problem. It's more how they manage that water at the surface. Great, I think we have one more question. So we'll finish up with this and then Ben Lunch. Okay. So in Texas, what communication or policy exists that ties the Texas Water Development Board with the DEQ, the water quality side and in terms of moving forward and making sure those left and right hands are shaking? Right, we try to very clearly distinguish roles, but where we do have overlap, we partner on, for example, there's a Texas Groundwater Protection Council that has membership of all agencies and we frequently get together. We bring the piece that we're working on there that we can contribute and we share information through that. We also, again, on the groundwater side, we produce legislative reports by every biennium that are co-authored by the two agencies. One example is a Priority Groundwater Management Area report to where collectively we look at the landscape of where there might be groundwater issues that might warrant the establishment of the Groundwater Conservation District. So we collectively get together, we share information, we produce those sort of reports and others. Railroad Commission is one of an example of where we're working really collaboratively with them is on this buffering of these injection wells to establish the brackish groundwater production zones. They have all the injection well data because they regulate, they have the USC program delegated from EPA. So we rely on their data to really assess that, but the works we're doing with the BRACS program to really characterize the offers, they rely on our data to be able to set minimum surface casing depth limits and provide information to the oil and gas industry. So we have a very collaborative relationship with that agency. We have, yep, the boss is gonna tell us what to do. We do have lunch for everyone, for those who would like to partake, what we're going to do in part to give you a chance to get up and stretch and also commingle with others is we're going to provide you with a meal ticket that you can take up to our cafeteria upstairs on the third floor, so one floor up and you can just get whatever you'd like there. The only thing you have to do is put your name on that card and then when you get in line or you don't even have to stand in line, you just give them your card and take your tray away. Encourage you to use the cafeteria tables to talk with each other and eat. You can come back down here with your trays if you'd like to do that as well. Courtney is walking that direction and she has the cards and Carly has a batch back there so two lines, more people can get through at once, that sort of thing. So encourage you to stretch and get something to eat and interact with your colleagues and then please be back here sharply. I'll just say it, 126 so that we can start promptly at 130. Thanks everyone. 125 and 30 seconds, so moved. Thanks everyone. Thanks for a great morning.