 So, good morning everyone. Welcome back to day two and we have a banquet tonight. So our poster presentations start and end earlier today. Otherwise, the day is not unlike every other day except we will have the keynotes only at one time today and that's in the morning right now. Which will be followed by after the break, breakouts for the business meetings. We have the Marine and Chesapeake groups, the coastal group, the critical zone, the geodynamics and hydrology. We have lunch and we have clinics on everything from permafrost to land lab to good enough practices for reproducible scientific computation. And we have an SEN, a sediment experimentalist clinic and the banquet. So the banquet, you can get there on your own, but we have buses that leave from your millennium, I think you're staying at, to the St. Julian. The St. Julian's downtown. We're trying this out. It's an expensive hotel and banquet compared to those we've done in the past. So if you've been unhappy, be happy tonight. And you're downtown, which is a good thing because then you can stay downtown and start doing pubbing. It's a great micro brewery kind of town. I think we're one of the highest per capita in the country, so actually don't drink because you have to come in for the next day's meeting, which is even fuller than today. So we're going to start with Michael Young. Michael is one of the leaders of an international program on soil modeling. And so without further ado, Michael. Okay, how does that, that better? Sorry. Okay, so thanks, Jai, and for CSDMS to inviting me to come here. It's really great to be here and to see a lot of friends and and and new friends and all the disciplines that that are being represented here. It's really, it's really terrific. And and so I want to thank my co-authors, Chris Van Looie and Hari Bereken, who are at the Eulich Center in Germany. And I'm Martin Vanderplug, who's at Bacchine in Holland. And they are part of this international soil modeling consortium, which I'll describe and why we're doing this and where there could be some really nice connections with CSDMS. And so, you know, you always want to have these these presentations like stories, you know, you start off with a storyline. And so we always want to start off with a happy story, you know, at the beginning, you know, that, you know, what is soil? And and I and I looked at the CSDMS website and I, I try to hit every web page and look for the word soil on every web page. And I did find it on one page one time, which is one time more than the geological side of America has on any of their web pages. And they're of course, right down the street. So so anyway, these are all the wonderful things that soil provides, you know, it's our our our life support system for the earth. It's a natural body that functions in very complex biogeochemical reactor that that's used for maintaining clean water for providing and nourishing plant life and all of the ag and all of the things that we do. And it preserves human records. So if anybody saw 60 minutes, anybody here watch 60 minutes, we're in Boulder. So 60 minutes is okay. And you'll see you'll have seen an amazing story on on on preserving human history using lidar and hyperspectral imaging. It was just it was terrific. But these are all the things that we do. But you know, now we get into the conflict part of the talk. And you know, but the current status of soil models are really, really diffuse. Soil is part of many different scientific disciplines from geomorphology to, you know, to hydrology to atmospheric sciences, many, many things. So it basically has it's sort of important to many, many groups, but it's not necessarily critical to anybody. So it sits in this kind of nexus of where it's necessary for many groups. But it isn't the main topic. It's sort of the it's the pathway that gets us to where we want to go. And the scientific community does not have easy to access and available standardized data sets and models that can be used and more easily plugged into some of these other models that really have end users. And these would be the climbing of the stakeholders need to know, okay, what's the climate going to be looking like? Nobody really wants to know what the soil is going to be looking like. Soil is the is the means to an end, not necessarily an end to itself. And and CSDMS has been has been doing this for a long time is making these models available, standardizing the inputs, putting wrappers around them so that they can be plugged in. And and so ISMIC, International Soil Modeling Consortium, is trying to do something similar, but really focusing on the soil part of it. And so this graph here, which looks really confusing. It's a very cool graph. And for the students here, there is the American Geosciences Institute publishes a workforce document into the future for geosciences every year or so. And and on the left on the on the sort of south on the southwest side of this graph here is all the earth science disciplines and and all the possible stakeholders are on the right hand side. And it's an absolutely it's a terrific document. But here are where is where all the soils fit in many, many different areas of the geosciences where soil has a real meaningful and substantial influence on how these processes are are kind of undergone. And and so we want to be able to to try to focus some of these efforts. So, you know, we see soils as an integrative medium across multiple scales and environments from the watershed scale to the subcachment to, you know, really at the vegetation scale, you know, the patch, the tree, you know, that the forest, that kind of thing and right down to the roots and the biomes. The challenge is as within any, any hydrologic geologic problem is it's a scaling issue. You know, we have substantial heterogeneity at the at the small scale, medium scale, high scale. How do we how do we treat this? How do we plug in soil which has really centimeter scale, you know, really profound variability at the centimeter scale. My background is really on studying eco hydrology of air lands and we see heterogeneity, you know, deterministic trends at the centimeter scale in deserts and soil properties. It's it's very tough to characterize. And so how do we integrate to use soils to integrate and and I showed this graph here yesterday and there was there were talks and discussions on integrated assessment modeling and this is just another one of the integrated assessment models that's that's based out of Cambridge. It's known as force here and and these panels are it's a little bit confusing, but I'll kind of walk you through it really quickly. There are these three panels, one the top is for water, the middle is for energy systems and the bottom is for as for land and land systems and these are all interconnected and we all study this as a matter of course the water, the land and and you know being at the University of Texas we deal with with energy. It's a big energy state. This is something that we're really focused on quite a bit and and the soil is obviously on the land side but it has connections all the way through the water and the energy the energy portion. We need to understand how these connect because going forward we have to plan for the infrastructure that's going to be necessary for a population of 400 million people in this country and we all know how long it takes to build infrastructure in this country. It's a very difficult to do. So we want to be able to to add the soil processes into these integrated assessments. We see ISMIC as as one means to unite the soil models. I tried to get the unite fist but it seemed to be politically incorrect. I'm like maybe I shouldn't do that. So in our really our goal here is to integrate an advanced soil systems model and that's that's our that's our focus. It's primarily it's it's very heavily right now populated with with Europeans. It's mostly out of Europe. I'm almost the token American in the group. We have another another guy from UC Merced but he's he's from Eritrea so but we adopted him and we have a lot of these objectives to promote integration of soil modeling expertise to do soil model intercomparison. People have heard of AgMIP is a really well known model intercomparison. There's a number of other climate intercomparisons that IPCC has been doing. We want to consolidate and develop soil and other data platforms so we are looking to to create sort of harmonized data sets that can be used for soil model intercomparisons and this is a really large activity that we're looking at and then we want to integrate how the soil outputs integrate into societal needs. We do not want to be what I would call a scientific cul-de-sac. We know that our output has to go somewhere and so we're very focused on okay we have all this data now who's going to use it and what impact is it's going to have and so we're focusing on on a couple things. One is essentially sort of model warehousing similar to CSDMS but also in the science and we're looking really at two things right now. One is on the climate interaction and the other is on the biosphere and on the climate interaction the the big focus is on understanding how soil structure you know the soil pads and you know and the layering and all the things that develop soils that pedogenic pedogenesis essentially influence the soil structure can be accounted for in these models. Generally they are not. Texture is is the primary input variable for estimating soil hydraulic properties and it's really not appropriate so we want to improve the pedotransfer functions and parameterization of the soil and to improve soil evaporation which is a large is the pathway for a large loss of of soil water. From the biosphere we're really looking at rhizosphere processing so in talking with folks at the Department of Energy Office of Science they are very supportive of what we're doing but their request was please don't downscale from the climate down to the plant scale because everybody is doing that and we don't understand what's happening at the root scale you know it's like anything else we we can we can go home we can we can plant the seeds and we can get the plants to grow but we don't really know what's happening at the root scale so we are trying to understand that and then parameterize that into some of these larger scale models. We're we're going to be looking at a lot of different techniques all the way from non-invasive imaging this is essentially CAT scan neutron scanning and tomography all the way up to remote sensing so we are going to try to harmonize and and essentially integrate these these scales so that the models themselves can can essentially capture the the signals that we're getting. So here's a sort of a cartoon of the of ISMIC and and so we have on the right side we have three boxes we call it these are these are our kind of science themes the DO link which is data and observations and how to link those into into models the soil model intercomparison that's the black box and the blue boxes what we're calling cross-connect which is just how to connect with other scientific disciplines and if you start from the bottom up and I realize that y'all on this side I you know I'm blocked by the foliage and so I can't I can't quite make it so so anyway so on the bottom is is where we're really looking at observational data these would be monitored watersheds critical zone observatories the terino soil track that's out of the UK and the critical zone sites that are in China so we're really trying to look at those observational data and to make sure that the metadata is is is accompanying the main data that's coming in this is a always a big issue people want to collect their own data because they can trust the data that they collect themselves we're trying to essentially assemble the metadata and the the schema that's going to be used so that it could be more easily imported into the models we obviously want to look at the at all the supporting processes and that's in the green box and I can barely see it myself because my glasses are out of date they exceeded the shelf life the soil natural capital and the degradation processes all of these things we're trying to capture and then we go into the ecosystem services so you know it's it's essentially a pathway of data from original collection to corporation into the processes into the ecosystem services and and a lot of that is is what is what CSDMS is doing as well and so these are the leads for for the different groups we tried to put a person that's based in the US as well as in in in Europe and I would say that we have we have about 350 members and probably 50 of them are from Germany so we can immediately increase the German population of CSDMS if we connect so there's I mean it's the little things so here are the really the goals again we want to create and collate soil data we want to we want to lead intermodel comparison and understand where the models work don't work and we want to exchange information with other disciplines to us it's you know and it's it's it's not widely accepted by my my colleagues in the soil physics community but I really think that for the most part these soil models are not the are a means to an end you know people are not going to are not running soil models because that's the end it's really the means to get to to promised land our structure you know we're not working on a trying to get this microphone set up here so our structure similar actually to this organization we have an executive board and and the science panel leads are all part of this executive board on the lead and harry harry and i are leading co-lead and and then we have a scientific advisory board and we chose them and and we're really lucky to have this this group because they plug into us federal agencies they they plug into different different scientific communities diana wall who's uh right up the street here she's very well known for soil biodiversity uh david lesham is the DOE officer science um he's the guy with the purse but he also is leading the virtual soil profiles for a department of energy through their national lab program so there's a there's a natural connection susan hubbard does near-surface geophysics and cryosphere processes jennifer hardened us soil carbon and you know you can see where all this leads we are trying to have them as our ambassadors to other scientific communities so that we can more easily connect connect with them and and and show a compelling compelling need uh and so what are what are the things that we've done in the past we're not even a year old uh we we had a meeting uh last year in austin and uh it was uh we had 125 people there for an inaugurator league which was great we have excellent barbecue and uh and so that was and we had really nice weather and that's the draw for people coming to europe because in march in europe you know the weather is rough and so coming to austin with the barbecue and the music was really was really great and we had excellent excellent discussions that started off the the ismc ismic um uh at that meeting and i i had to leave the room when they were electing leads and i came back and that's that's how i'm here now um and so we we had a paper that harry wrote in beta stone journal earlier this year actually a late last year it's already on the web of knowledge high site so it's it's one of the hot papers but it's like a 50 page 50 page article in journal i mean that was a huge page chart you can imagine and even we being the editors we still have to pay and and so we've had a lot of informal meetings uh as well as formal means we just met at egu a couple weeks ago in vienna i uss the international union of soil science now has a soil modeling working group we're now part of gwix under what's known as soil lot and so we're really sort of working um to go through this and we have our own suite of models these are all soil based for people who are familiar with hydrus which is a very well known code based out of uc riverside uh hydrus is part of this and these really about 40 models total that hit all sorts of things from nitrogen mineralization to carbon dynamics uh surface runoff processes a lot of things and some of the models may overlap uh with csdms as well and and we're really focusing now on on two uh what i would call sort of two two science projects we know that warehousing uh models is just not going to be sexy enough to capture the imagination of the scientific community so we are focusing on science as well and the first one is to look at the global soil footprint and if we think about carbon footprint and water footprint and you know we we see these uh these sort of efforts that are happening uh both at the at sort of the un level and also in organizations around the world i mean you know what's the water footprint for a community how many how many leaders of water does it take to grow one kilogram of beef for example you know all of these things that focus on on what's the human impact on on the plant and so we're doing this also for uh for the global soil footprint what does it take to sustain human populations within sort of the global sphere and this graphic which was published out of the un last year really shows where the risks to biodiversity are located you can see red of course is the hot colors are where the risk is high and the green colors are where the risk is low and the arctic right now is mostly green because it's still frozen but how long that's gonna how long that's gonna go for as anybody's guessing what we're trying to do is is avoid some of these threats going forward again as the population continues to grow and as food sources are needed and you can see this laundry list of of of you know the threats plant loss nutrient inputs wildfire soil erosion things like that and energy development is one of them this is something that we're studying as well on i know that colorado is too and the goal here is really a zero net loss of soil resources so that we can continue to sustain the population that we have and that we're going to have the second is is really pretty exciting is is within the geox community this is the global energy and water exchange group it's it's based in i think it's based in the haig and it has a very heavy european sort of un type of a feel to it and you know one of our hypothesis is that the global climate models do a relatively poor job of including soil parameters and soil processes in those models themselves and it's super super important how you know how is energy and water exchange at the land service influencing local and global climate it's a big impact and we don't know how to do it very well because the heterogeneity at the soil scale can't be captured when you're looking at 200 kilometer grid scales on you know on the global scale so this is just a problem that has been um the climate community has been struggling and the general public doesn't know what to believe because they see these huge error bars and the temperatures going forward and now what are we supposed to do with uh and making decisions when you have error bars anywhere between two degrees c and eight degrees you know it's it's a tough it's a tough lift so you know we're we're going to be looking to integrate soil data and soil models into a a code a code base that's known as olam or olam it's the ocean land and atmosphere model it was originally developed to study hurricanes and tornadoes these are you know atmospheric from an atmospheric physics standpoint we have super high gradients as well as time you know very high time temporal heterogeneity you know when you think about a tornado so we're going to be able to use that platform and scale that down our goal is to scale olam down to the shrub scale and have it scale up to the global scale similar to what you see there so uh is that is that going to be possible we don't know we we calculated a conservative number of eight billion degrees of freedom um the first time we ran that so um and you got to start somewhere and and we we have really fast computers uh and anyway and and uh so anyway i'll go i'll keep going so i don't get laughed off so uh so ronnie avisar and bob walko and who are developing the code bob has been working at eth and at ulex center now for several months we have been funded for a full year just to work on parameterizing the soil and plant specific processes within the model from essentially from what you see it from the pet on scale up into something that would be regional or global if we can we can we can do it um we were asked by nsf to go forward with a pyre proposal this is a sort of international research and engineering group we so we now have universities uh i think eight universities and five countries that are going to be working on this we have super computer access at three universities so we're really going to try to make if we can get the funding to make that work you know and here's really where the problem is i was mentioning before the difference between soil texture and soil structure and the graph on the left the histogram uh shows you know it's basically if you take just the soil texture alone you're looking at the hydraulic conductivity the ksat i was talking with somebody last night about ksat um and and and when you include the soil structure you get a completely different soil type uh and soil process and um you know the question i had at dinner was well you know can you what is you know is ksat you know okay can we use it and i was like you know in models ksat is not a physical property it's a fitting parameter and and because we don't know how to incorporate things like soil texture we don't even have to quantify soil texture we just say it's well structured poorly structured medium structure i mean we don't even have a numerical quantification for soil structure so we're really we've been trying for a hundred years to do this can you know and and still nobody funds it so um and and so you know but it does have a big impact and the graph on the left it shows the difference in sensible heat flux when we include uh soil structure and you can see we're talking up to 10 watts per meter square it's a it's a it's a substantial number in uh in large portions of of the country and and globally and the difference in soil temperature as well that number is three degrees c in red so the difference by including soil structure in the models and that's all we're doing is adding that as a big impact and if we if we try to take what we know about the soil in terms of its structure and its texture and try to add what what are known as peto transfer functions people here know what a peto transfer function is okay so people understand soil properties hydraulic properties there's the hydraulic conductivity and then there's a retention curve which is the a calibration curve of the soil that relates the soil water pressure to the water content and and measuring these things in the lab is a very time consuming it's difficult to do uh and then you're transporting your soil into the lab to take the measurement and trying to relate that to what's happening in the field that's you know there's errors there too so the peto transfer function takes relatively easy to measure properties it could be texture it could be some nominal measurement of soil structure it could be organic carbon it could be calcium carbonate concentration and it estimates what the the hydraulic properties for the soil are going to be and uh and this is and if you so you know if you go worldwide and you look at the uh the nrcs soil data mart and you know there's a lot of soil data and soil pet data that's available across the country there's 10 000 soil pits that can be downloaded pretty much at your fingertips you can essentially estimate what the soil hydraulic properties are going to be and you can include elements of soil structure directly within the peto transfer function and and that's what we're going to be really trying to focus on and as we link this to the climate models and we in norlands uh in norlands uh later this year we're going to we're trying to organize a peto transfer function workshop so if anybody here is interested you know give me give me a shout and i can i can point you in the right direction to to really look at how to do this at the global scale and tom hangle from the from israel in in in holland is has been really working on this so okay so i see i'm about to get the hook here are the groups that we've connected with across at gwix i uss and deli office of science and and so what are the opportunities that we have here you know of course uh we want to connect uh you know with the partnering with csdms for us could be a really great thing and i've already been in touch with my guys possibly a soils focused research group you know we're looking at soil soil model hackathons and as well as this peto transfer function a model that this conference it's going to be at agu and with that if there's we want to make soil models great again this is bolder after all and uh i'm happy to take any questions let's let's thank michael and we do have time for a couple of questions you can buy these just call me i guess i have a question elson jaffer of was almost um i have a question about the soil models like what do you mean by soil models because in my mind i used to think about for example harmonize world so database that clmc or any other model use like what do you mean by models well you know that's a good question and and uh i would say that soil physics and soil modeling is uh is a discipline that has many fathers right it comes from ag it comes from engineering comes from hydro it comes from geotech these are mostly models that are coming mostly from the ag community uh they are focusing really on the top two to three meters of soil not at the exclusion but it handles things like more on the soil chemistry soil soil uh on agricultural inputs and those types it's a it's a different class of models that are typically available or known to the hydrologic and engineering i don't know that there's a good definition for it's on i'm sort of winging it thank you michael we're gonna move on now so our next speaker is one of our chairs and it's kim de mudsard who's going to be talking about modeling a coastal environment with human