VIEW envisions a collaborative and integrated research community that is united towards a sustainable global water future. We imagine that a water reanalysis will enable effective and equitable seasonal to multidecadal planning and decision-making for conservation, energy, food, and water security at regional scales; quantify the limits of sustainable water extraction; identify regions and ecosystems facing systemic risk within the coming decades; and address opportunities for a sustainable water future for everyone. Further, this product may provide a robust basis for prediction and exploration of scenarios and counterfactuals of water availability.
The VIEW program seeks to grow in terms of process-representation in the hydrologic cycle. All projects are expected to join a collaborative program where projects work together towards the development of a reanalysis product while also advancing basic and applied science. Projects are also expected to have global relevance.
VIEW is accepting EOIs that address one of the below targeted opportunities:
1.P-E. A comprehensive reanalysis for Earth’s freshwater should represent atmospheric and terrestrial processes in a robust and self-consistent data product and framework. The first cohort of VIEW projects span a range of natural and anthropogenic terrestrial hydrologic processes. In the current portfolio, precipitation is included in multiple projects through the use of climate reanalyses, such as ERA5, as a forcing. The VIEW reanalysis will therefore be constrained by the accuracy and precision of the atmospheric processes that they include, and the manner in which they are incorporated. A key term in the hydrological balance is P-E, the net atmosphere-land exchange measured as the difference between precipitation and evapotranspiration; the VIEW-2 call seeks proposals that will integrate P-E with more fidelity into the VIEW reanalysis. Proposals that respond to this ambitious theme must go beyond the status quo towards reconciling atmospheric and terrestrial systems (e.g., bias correction, downscaling, land-atmosphere feedbacks etc.). This is a significant challenge, and we encourage applicants to be bold and creative in their proposals, but we remain open to more traditional or established methods.
2.Feedbacks and transitions: A comprehensive freshwater reanalysis should also capture feedbacks in the hydrologic cycle, as well as regime shifts and tipping points. Existing water data assimilation systems have made progress towards linking processes (ex. coupled surface water and groundwater), but focused effort will be required to include even first-order feedbacks with sufficient accuracy and resolution globally. The current VIEW portfolio represents a large and yet incomplete range of processes and linkages; the VIEW-2 call aims to fill in missing feedbacks and transitions such as soil moisture, wetlands and lakes, permafrost, and groundwater resources.
Projects may propose any approach or methodology in order to make progress towards representing the above processes in the VIEW reanalysis. This may include advances in innovative data-driven techniques to constrain those processes using observations (ex. leveraging AI, developing fully empirical approaches, etc., including both differentiable and derivative-free methods), improvements to earth systems models, new data collection and integration, etc.. We request that all proposals place an emphasis on ideas and approaches that are synergistic with or complementary to VIEW-1 projects, with direct links where possible (see below for project descriptions).