Opportunities for Transformative Measurement in Surface Hydrology

Hydrologic science is being advanced primarily by experiments based on off-the-shelf technology marketed for environmental sensing. Most of this equipment has been available for two decades, and is not well positioned to support fundamental breakthroughs needed to advance understanding. At the same time, two major classes of new technologies have advanced by orders of magnitude: inexpensive accurate single parameter devices, and high-resolution multi-scale systems. The cheap single-point tools are now transformative due to the nearly no-cost memory and wireless communication technologies, which allow for simultaneous measurement at hundreds of locations. Examples include multi-gas sensors, ultra-sonic depth sensors, IR-temperature sensors, microphones, cell-camera stream gauges, and soil moisture probes. For the next few years devices employing massive local memory are likely to continue to be central, replaced thereafter by wireless devices that continuously upload to the web, reducing data loss, is feasible at more locations, and less labor intensive. We will present several examples of recent implementations of these ideas, and the scientific advances that have resulted in the areas of snow distribution, stream flow, lake dynamics, mineshafts, and canopy interception.