Breakout Summary Report

Breakout Description

The session will focus on the science needs of the hydrometeorological and hydroclimatological communities recently identified by the Integrated Mountainous Hydroclimate Workshop. The session will begin by discussing the recent developments to support those needs from field campaigns in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB). Specifically, with the completion of the data collection phase of the SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS campaigns there is a pressing need to summarize the status of the data sets collected by these campaigns, identify the key scientific targets on which the scientific community can focus for the first part of the analysis phase of these campaigns, and collect feedback from the community to ensure those targets support the highest-priority science needs. To that end, the session will describe these campaigns and then will devote discussion to ensure all of the data collected in the East River Watershed from SAIL, SPLASH, SOS, guest instruments and others are accessible and supportive of community science interests.

The session will solicit community-wide contributions for lightning talks. There are also data sets and key scientific findings that support mountain hydroclimate research outside of the UCRB, so the session welcomes presentations and discussion on atmosphere and land-atmosphere interaction science in high-altitude complex terrain that are transferable. Ultimately, the goal of the session is to foster collaborations across the community to ensure the hundreds of datastreams collected over the UCRB and beyond are part of scientific workflows that see the advancement of integrated mountainous hydroclimate science.

Main Discussion

The purpose of the breakout session was to provide an overview to the ARM/ASR PI meeting community of SAIL data and science, specifically highlighting the conclusion of SAIL’s data collection phase to lay the foundation of a scientifically productive, collaborative environment during the data analysis phase of SAIL and its partner campaigns, NOAA SPLASH and NSF SOS. The session was also designed to pique interest from attendees so that they consider (1) taking a closer look at SAIL data, (2) initiating new scientific activities with SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS data, and (3) pursuing collaborations with scientists involved in the SAIL and/or SPLASH and/or campaigns.  Given the depth and breadth of the SAIL campaign, including the fact that it had collected data for more than 21 months when this breakout session was held (data collection spanned September 1, 2021 to June 15, 2023), this session was timely and the hybrid format enabled attendance not just of the ARM/ASR PI meeting community, but also of researchers that continue to partner with SAIL or may form new partnerships.

The breakout session spanned two hours and had one brief session introduction presentation followed by 13 lightning science presentations followed by an open discussion. The lightning presentations highlighted many aspects of research and data collection that occurred in the East River Watershed, including an overview of the SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS campaigns, precipitation, aerosol, and snowfall-to-snowpack science activities, and then preliminary science results, completed science results, and a discussion about next steps for science.

The wide range of presentations, community attendance, and the subsequent discussion highlighted the broad community interest in SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS campaign data, along with data from the Watershed Function SFA, and science that arises from each of the data sets and the data sets combined. At the same time, several researchers mentioned the ongoing challenges that the community faces.

The first challenge pertains to data: there is a lack of awareness of all of the data sets that are available from SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS, among others.  The different data policies between DOE, the NOAA labs that contributed to SPLASH, and NSF have led to a landscape of atmospheric data collected at the East River Watershed that is both rich in information on atmospheric processes and land-atmosphere interactions and difficult to search and access.  The need for cross-community calibration with the data was also very apparent.  Many audience members expressed interest in working on science projects with SAIL, SPLASH, SOS, and Watershed Function SFA data but did not have the expertise to complete the science without expertise from others in the community. 

Key Findings

To address ERW data awareness and access challenges, especially to support new ASR-funded research in the ERW, there is a potential role for open-source notebooks and other software resources that ARM has developed to serve as a middle-layer for managing data access policies by providing the community with examples for how to access data across the three campaigns.  The breakout session noted that the ARM Community Toolkit could be particularly well suited for this application and that the educational material that ARM has developed is also well positioned to manage data awareness and access challenges across the three campaigns.  At the same time, there was a clear need for an encyclopedia that describes, at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, the data that are available in the ERW.

To address the need for collaboration between existing projects, new projects, and nascent science collaborations, the breakout session found that a dedicated, in-person science gathering (Science Summit) is a critically important next step to advance the scientific return on the investments from SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS.  There are key collaborations that are needed and synergistic scientific expertise that can and should be entrained to explore radiation, aerosol, and precipitation process science.

Issues

There remain enduring challenges for making SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS data accessible outside of the most dedicated researchers who are willing to go the extra mile to seek out all of the data.  ACT Jupyter notebooks and encyclopedic resources that describe each datastream in accessible ways would be helpful.

Needs

The largest two needs that were identified were (1) to have ACT developers work with SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS researchers to build example Jupyter notebooks with tutorial examples for accessing and analyzing SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS data sets and (2) to plan and host a Science Summit in fall, 2023 at a location that is easily accessible by researchers pursuing science with data from the three campaigns.

Decisions

The ad hoc community of SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS researchers would continue collaborations during the analysis phase, especially to support newly-funded ASR projects.

Future Plans

The SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS communities will continue biweekly meetings, plan a Science Summit, and plan for AGU and AMS meetings and future scientific meetings.

Action Items

The SAIL, SPLASH, and SOS PIs will plan a Science Summit and meet regularly with ACT developers to build tutorial Jupyter notebooks.