 Well, good morning, everyone. Good morning. It's wonderful to have you all here. And on behalf of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, I wanted to welcome you very warmly and enthusiastically to this workshop on groundwater recharge and flow with a special focus on using remotely sensed data. I'm Elizabeth Ada, and I am the director of the Water Science and Technology Board here at the National Academies. And it's been our real pleasure and delight to work over the last year or so to coordinate and organize this workshop. And we're absolutely thrilled that you all are here today, as I think you all know. We had a couple of speed bumps along the way, as you're aware, in getting to this particular day. And so I wanted to take a couple of moments here to thank the folks who really helped to pull all of this together. As they say, it takes a village. And we had a city. We had a real city of folks who were working on this project. And again, bringing it all together, the first group of people I wanted to thank are the staff team, who were really the engine behind it all. And two people in particular I wanted to thank, that's Lauren Everett, who's over here to my right, and Carly Brody, who's in the back of the room. I think all of you at many points in time have been in contact with them for various reasons. Their excellent professionalism, their skills, their incredible organization, and a deep well of optimism that I have rarely experienced with people before have really been keys to bringing us to this point. I also wanted to recognize staff you've seen or met already this morning. Eric Edkin, who's manning the console back there. And Brandon McGovern, who's out in the foyer. If you have questions or need anything, any of us can help you. The staff team is here to make sure that everything goes right throughout the two days of this workshop. The second set of folks I want to thank is our wonderful planning committee. I'll turn the floor over to Venkat Lakshmi momentarily, who served as the intrepid chair of the planning committee. You have a couple of our planning committee members are here. You'll see them active throughout the day today, Kathleen Jones and Khamenei Singhha. Antar Jutla will be joining us a little bit later. Two of our planning committee members weren't able to make it here, but all of them remained steadfast and really contributed a lot in terms of their knowledge, skill sets, insights as we worked forward with the planning of this workshop. And as you know, the academies relies on volunteers. And I think they didn't plan for such a long tour of duty with this particular workshop. But they were enthusiastic throughout, and that was incredibly helpful to us. The third set of folks I wanted to recognize is the sponsor of the workshop, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Representative Tony is here. You'll hear from him in a few moments. They too have been very collaborative in helping us work through some of these external challenges that have changed the date and so forth with the workshop. They've been very interested and supportive of the workshop. And again, we have a collective sigh of relief that we're here and looking forward to the exchanges throughout the next two days. And finally, the set of folks I want to thank are all of you who are here in the rooms and online. First and foremost, our speakers, again, who have been very much working with us as we've wrestled with different dates and shifting schedules. But the enthusiasm and interest that you've expressed over the last 10 months have really been an inspiration for us to push forward with this and put together the workshop as you see it in your agenda. So with that, I wanted to just encourage you to make the most of the opportunity that you have here today to work together and discuss with your colleagues and make the most of the breakout sessions, too. Those are going to result in a proceedings volume, which we'll discuss shortly. And enjoy yourselves here. I'll talk a little bit about some of the housekeeping items after Venkat introduces the program itself. So thanks very much for being here and enjoy your day. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you very much. And thanks to all of you for coming. And I want to re-echo Elizabeth's sentiments that I think the perseverance of the National Academy staff is to be duly noted in this regard, because instead of having it quickly in January, it got pushed all the way back to June. But thank you, everybody, for being here. So the topic of the workshop is on groundwater recharge and flow, approaches and challenges for monitoring and modeling using remotely sensed data. So why this topic? Now our sponsor is NGA, and you'll hear from Tony in a few minutes. Water security is essential to healthy human population, economic growth, and stability of communities and countries. And if you look almost every day in the newspaper or on the television, you see articles about water, much more so than, let's say, even five years ago. Obviously, much more so than 10 years ago. And the knowledge of water availability is an integral component to US national security, as will be stressed by Tony. Now groundwater withdrawals is particularly concentrated in areas already experiencing severe water stress. And these are in many of the countries of the world. And now, 30 years ago, when we used to think about hydrologic modeling, we never thought of putting in groundwater. I still remember my first hydrologic model. I had a 2-meter layer. And what happened below 2 meters stayed below 2 meters. I didn't know what happened. But now, if you do that, it's professional, academic, and scientific suicide. I mean, you cannot do that. I mean, you have to put in, and many of you in the rooms have been pioneers in discovering those connections, putting in those connections, as well as observing and validating those connections. So that's the whole reason. And the evaluation of groundwater storage, flow, recharge, it requires a whole suite of expertise. This is not just models. It's observations, remotely slenced observations, in-situ observations. And again, over the next two days, you will be listening to a lot of experts and discussing among yourselves what are the best methods. So the workshop goals has some overarching questions. And these questions and goals come from our sponsor, NGA. So what are the scientific and technological frontiers in monitoring, modeling, regional groundwater, recharge, and flow in various regions across the globe? And so if you think about it, and if you just think about your geography, you will realize that most countries of the world have some groundwater issue. Most countries of the world. I would not say all, but most countries of the world. So we are now dealing with studies outside United States as many of the speakers will allude to. And then how can remotely-sensed data be utilized in regions where in-situ measurements and observations and instrumentation can be difficult? Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes it is not available because those countries purely wish not to share their data with all of us. So one of the four of the different panels, which we will see, are basically reflecting the four big science questions which are agreed upon between NGA and the National Academies and our Planning Committee. And they are assess regional freshwater budget under major use scenarios, examine the research frontiers for characterizing groundwater aquifers, discuss model uncertainties and methods for mitigating these uncertainties, and then consider our ability to detect which water management strategies are being used and how could they change over time? So these are basically, we could call them as four research topics, four research challenges, research frontiers, whatever you want to call them. And so we cleverly organized the four panels around these topics. So these are the four panels you will see, and there are speakers in each of those panels. So this is the Planning Committee. I'm very thankful to the members of the committee who have been on this workshop since I would say since last November when we first had our first call and people have been there. And so two of the members who were really important to this committee, Dennis Lett and Meyer and Jeff Emiglietti, both could not be here this week, but we are in the Planning Committee as well as the academies. We want to thank them for all their input and their hard work. And I would thank the people who are here today already, Kathleen and Kamini, and then Antar will join us tomorrow. So the agenda is very simple. I mean, just give you a bird's eye view. First, after me and Elizabeth finish up out here, we will have a reflection from the sponsor. Tony will present a set of slides and motivate your creative juices to get going. And then we have two keynote talks by Matt Rodel and Holly Michael. And then we have the panel one followed by a breakout on the panel one. So it's very simple. The breakouts follow the topics. The breakout follows the panels up and then we have a panel two in the afternoon and the breakout following the panel. So it's a very simple arrangement. And the breakouts are designed to be four of them and your stickers tell you which breakout room you go to on day one and day two. So they have two different colors, okay? So you are lumped into your breakout room by color. And so don't get confused because the breakouts are designed to answer the same questions, but we will get four different answers. So this will be good for facilitating discussion. And then on the day two, we have panel three mitigating groundwater model uncertainties and a breakout associated with that topic. And then panel four strategies, change in water management strategies over time. And then we have breakout four and then we wrap up with reflections. And that would be a time for anybody to chime in or discuss or present their thoughts. And so this is the breakouts. The breakouts, do you want to take over? So the breakouts is where it all happens and Elizabeth will take over. So I'll just walk a little bit through some of the logistics as Venkat outlined. You did have your pre-assigned to your breakout groups. And the breakouts are really an important part of our activity here because we're going to expand on the panel discussions because a big part of a workshop like this is to draw on the collective expertise in the room. And the breakouts enable us to gather you all together to talk amongst yourselves and really focus on some of those questions. These will then be written up in a workshop proceedings which I'll talk about in a moment. As Venkat outlined, there are four different colors. You'll only have two on your badges, for one for today and one for tomorrow. You've been assigned to your groups and then tomorrow you'll be in a different group. Your color is different, but we've also mixed you up a little bit because we want to see what the different interactions also will bring forward. So it's a little bit fun. You'll get to interact with some colleagues that you might not otherwise have a chance to. And we encourage you also to really take advantage of the breakouts because that's an opportunity to dig into some of these issues in ways that are really meaningful. We each room is going to be staffed with a committee member who's going to moderate the breakout session, a rapporteur, because we've lurked around and found a number of you who were ready to volunteer to assist us as rapporteurs. And then there'll be a staff person in the room also taking notes. They'll be trying to focus you down on a set of questions so that they can come back and report out those in plenary afterwards. So to the degree that you can help them to focus the key themes down to a couple of high-level points, that'll be really, really useful for us. The breakouts look like this. If you're orange today, you're going to be in this particular room. Van Kat's going to be moderating. Carly and Eric are going to be the staff people here and we're sorting out the rapporteur situation so don't be surprised if you get asked to do something. The green folks are going to be in the East Street Conference Center. I'll get to the map and how to get there in a moment, but I think the best task if you are green is to find Lauren because she will take you there and it's around the corner in a little bit funny route to get to that particular room. A yellow with Kathleen and I will be staffing that room today and that's going to be in room 105. It's just around the corner and blue you'll be up on the second floor so it's just a little hike up the stairs there and then with Khamenei and Brendan and we'll give you instructions before the breakouts this afternoon so you don't have to worry about that until then but just kind of for your awareness and then again we'll be switching things up a little bit tomorrow but all the moderator, rapporteur and staff people will stay in the rooms that they're assigned. So here just so that you have a map of the layout of the floor, we're in the lecture hall and so rooms 105 and 106, 105 we're using today and 106 tomorrow so they're on just off to my left here out the door and to the left, second floor as I said you just hop up the stairs there and room 202 would be back behind me if you will at the end of the hall and again just find a staff person and all the rooms are labeled so you won't get lost we promise. With regard to the workshop proceedings that have been mentioned a couple of times this is actually the product that NGA really requested of us. So we have the workshop that's going to be put together it's a rapporteur authored proceedings volume and it's going to be documenting what's said here today both in the plenary and in the breakouts which is did I say it the breakouts are really, really important so please, please participate in those and make them as dynamic and engaging and forthcoming about what you think the answers to those questions really are because that's really going to feed into that workshop proceedings we expect to release it this autumn and the speaker abstracts will be included as an appendix in that volume as well so we thank you all the speakers not only for your presentations that you'll be sharing but also for the abstracts that you supplied to us. I'm going to note a couple of logistics and housekeeping items before we get underway. You're all at the tables we did arrange the room in this way for a bit more of a collaborative feel I think that's already working because I saw a lot of you chatting with one another which is terrific. You have microphones at your tables in the plenaries and afterwards there's going to be some moderated discussion please just raise your hands the moderator will call on you and please do use the microphones because we're trying to reach the folks online as well. There is a button at the bottom of your microphone on the right side the right button turns the microphone on and pressing that same button turns it off. After you've spoken if you can turn it off that would be really helpful because we can't have more than about four on at the same time or they don't work so just remember to use the mics that would be really helpful. We also have and Carly's holding it up in the back there that catch box if you're feeling very adventurous Carly will throw that at you and you can talk into it. It's a microphone. It doesn't transmit while it's in the air so you don't have to worry about that but it does it works just like a regular microphone for some of you who may be at not at a table or you may shift your seat or you're a bit back from the table if you'd like to test that out Carly is more than happy to bring it round to you to have you talk into that and ask your questions. We are recording this. It is being broadcast live. We also do want to post this after the meeting and so that's very important to us. We want to have the speakers presentations available as well and we will be able to do that as long as we have copyright permission from them to do so and we ask you all if you haven't signed your consent forms catch Carly at some point and we can work that out with you. If you haven't loaded your presentations with Eric please do so and for those of you online you will be able to participate in the plenary in a Q and A format. If you have questions there's a chat function and Eric will be able to field those questions and then he'll raise his hand if those questions do come in online. So again we want to encourage you to speak with us and have your questions posed to the excellent speakers we have gathered here today. So for the speakers there's a timer, a big clock you can't miss it once you get up here big red clock and it's going to count down and so we'd like you to pay attention to that and try to stay to your time because we want to make sure we're moving through the agenda promptly. For all of you who have cell phones and I think that's probably 100% of the room could you double check them please just to make sure they're not on ring and if it's possible you could even put it on airplane mode so that you don't look at it so that you're paying attention to the session here today because we really want you 100% focused. Finally, I just want to do a little safety moment. You're our guests here today we want you all to be very safe. I don't think we're anticipating a test of the fire alarms today. However, if something happens the fire alarm could go off. The procedure for exiting the building we are in the prime spot to get out very quickly and promptly. I'd say pick up your small things your PC leave a roller bag if you have one leave it here and proceed out exactly the way you came in that's the quickest and shortest route out of the building through the main lobby. Our assembly point some of you may have seen the very large red brick building caddy corner across the street from us that's the National Building Museum they have a big grassy lawn in the front that's our assembly point. So just proceed out the door go over to that grassy lawn and then we'd wait until the security guards tell us it's safe to come back in. Other points of interest we have a lot of food and beverages if you need refreshing that's not at the break please feel free to get up and do that it's going to be going all day out there and then the restrooms are just around the corner to the right hand side. So with that I think I'm going to turn the floor back over to Venkat to get us started for the day.