MODELING OF INTEGRATED HYDRO-TERRESTRIAL ENVIRONMENTS AT HUMAN-RELEVANT SCALES WITH HIGH FIDELITY: KEY INGREDIENTS AND INEVITABLE OBSTACLES (Invited Presentation)

The advent of readily available computing and data storage resources has enabled simulating regional hydro-terrestrial environments over longer periods in time and finer spatial and temporal resolution. This has created, however, a need for greater fidelity in both the treatment of biophysical processes acting in the landscape and the human actions that alter biophysical pools and fluxes of water, energy, and nutrients. We present here a synthesis of several ongoing efforts aimed at advancing simulation of the integrated hydro-terrestrial environment. We detail, in particular, advances aimed at improving details of representations of human actions that explicitly couple human and biophysical environments and using biophysical models that couple the land-atmosphere system. What emerges from these efforts are a series of key ingredients that have enabled high-fidelity modeling of hydro-terrestrial environments at human-relevant scales. Among the most important of these ingredients are: (1) developing scalable, transferable, and extensible typologies of human actors that directly impact biophysical systems, (2) applying biophysical process models that prognostically simulate variables that are measurable and that humans modify, and (3) establishing partnerships with land and resource management organizations that can improve the representation of management activities and the design of modeling experiments designed to characterize system response to perturbations. At the same time, we outline some of the obstacles to be overcome in developing, validating, and applying models of integrated hydro-terrestrial environments at human-relevant scales.