Water management: how much do we know and is it enough?

National Geographic just posted a blog by Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist from UC Irvine. One of Jay's opening statements:

A critical problem that we face in the U.S. is that as a country, we lack the vision and leadership to clearly articulate our fundamental water issues, and to implement a comprehensive plan to tackle them.

He described three "unfortunate realities" that reflect gaps in our understanding in hydrology:  we don't know how much fresh water occurs on land, we don't understand what goes on beneath the surface of either soil or water, and the computer models we use to forecast drought and water availability still aren't up to the task.

Jay outlines a national strategy for improving our ability to monitor and predict water availability. You can read his challenge here.

But that's not all.

CCWAS PI Graham Fogg points out that we don't know how much water gets transferred between the atmosphere and surface, either as precipitation or evapotranspiration.

And co-PI Mark Lubell chimed in with his blog about the pressing need for social scientists to collaborate with physical and natural scientists to tackle the human dimensions of what to do after we figure out how much water we have.

Both blogs are well worth reading.