RAISE: Building resilience to Earth system hazards: forecasting drinking water quality with real-time integrated catchment modeling

Using simulations of biological and natural processes, this project will generate real-time forecasts of water quality in three reservoirs in Appalachia. Droughts, wildfires, and other hazards alter normal ecosystem processes, which can harm drinking water quality. Water utilities are increasingly concerned about the effects that fires and floods have on water supply reservoirs.

Appalachia is experiencing increasing hazards as well as aging infrastructure. Researchers will create the first integrated, real-time system that forecasts future water quality. With this information, water managers may act preemptively to address anticipated changes.

This will help decrease costs and improve drinking water safety. Researchers and water managers will work together to produce the forecasting system, which will ensure forecasts are integrated into decision-making. This project will improve STEM education by developing teaching modules on forecasting and reservoir-catchment dynamics for high school and community college students.

The improved forecasting that will result from this research project will help reduce the effects of hazards on water quality.

Drinking water quality is threatened globally by changing Earth system hazards. To build resilience in drinking water supplies, water utilities and communities are seeking new predictive tools for guiding catchment and reservoir management decisions. Most water quality research has focused on the influence of hazards on bodies of water separately from their catchments.

This project will create a coupled catchment-reservoir forecasting system that will predict future water quality one day to six months prior to treatment. This system will couple terrestrial and freshwater models to fully represent the direct and indirect environmental processes and hazards controlling reservoir water quality. Including the feedback between terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems can help to mitigate increasing risks to drinking water supplies.

Researchers and water managers will work together to develop forecast tools, risk models, and data visualizations. This will ensure their broad usability for guiding decision-making. This project will develop teaching materials to improve education for K-12 and community college students.

The coupled catchment-reservoir forecasting system developed by this work will be made available globally as a model for drinking water systems.

This project is jointly funded by the Division of Research, Innovation, Synergies, and Education in the Directorate for Geosciences and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure through the National Discovery Cloud for Climate initiative.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.