Keynote Address-1: Multi-scale Experimentation and Modeling for Problem Solution in Water and Environmental Systems – Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Meeting the increasing needs of a growing world population, exacerbated by climate change, will continually challenge water and environmental scientists and engineers for years to come. Theoretical, modeling, computational advances, and monitoring and characterization technologies will help meet some of these challenges. Field and laboratory studies for conceptualization, hypothesis testing, and modeling have continued to advance the sciences. However, the data to study some problems cannot always be obtained in the field where many factors contribute to the uncertainty of measurements and model parameter estimates. The primary thesis of this talk is that laboratory experiments conducted at multiple test scales in conjunction with multi-scale models will provide new insights into complex processes and accurate data for reliable predictions. Design and implementation of theory-driven experiments from examples of groundwater contamination, carbon dioxide storage to mitigate global warming, and land/atmospheric interactions applied to food security are presented to show how advances can be made for practical problem solutions. A case is made that addressing water and environmental problems requires laboratory and field studies and modeling interaction. Further, water and environmental scientists and engineers must work in multidisciplinary teams at the disciplinary interfaces of earth, water, energy, and the environment to address current and emerging local and global problems of water and the environment.