WATER RESOURCES AND CLIMATE FROM SCIENCE TO DECISIONS

The state of water is important across all 17 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and remains critical for climate science, adaptation, and policy. Water and climate challenges include cloud physics, hydrometeorological and hydrological processes, water quantity and quality, water extremes such as floods and droughts, as well as the nexus of water with food, energy, ecosystems, infrastructures, and emergency management. This presentation describes the interconnections across water and climate sciences and the corresponding implications for adaptation decisions and mitigation policies. The roles of both big and small data, the challenges inherent in developing and using parameterized physics models across scales, the criticality of coupled natural and human processes, as well as the role of data-driven sciences including AI and the integrations thereof with process understanding and process-based models, are discussed. The challenges of internal variability and irreducible uncertainty to predictive understanding and translation to decisions, as well as the promise of nonlinear dynamical methods in combination with process-guided AI or data sciences, are emphasized along with case studies.