Strengthening cross-agency bi-national partnerships to improve regional water management and prediction capabilities
Abstract
Addressing data management and forecasting needs for regional water management commonly requires coordination between multiple state and federal agencies, and reconciliation of discrepancies between disparate sources of information. These requirements become all-the-more challenging when water monitoring infrastructure is sparse, or when infrastructure design protocols follow (and differ across) jurisdictional boundaries. Here, we present novel advancements in partnerships between federal government representatives from the United States (US) and Canada that have addressed many of these requirements specifically for the Laurentian Great Lakes. The Great Lakes constitute the largest collective surface of fresh unfrozen water on Earth (Lake Superior alone is the largest lake by surface area), and the Great Lakes basin is effectively bisected by the US-Canada border. The suite of models and data sets needed to manage, forecast, and understand intrinsic changes in the Great Lakes hydrologic and climate system therefore depend critically on experts with diverse backgrounds ranging from coastal engineering and meteorology, to ice climatology and hydropower facilities management. Here, we present a subset of partnerships within the Great Lakes basin that have evolved over several decades to address these needs. We emphasize how those partnerships have led to the development and communication of information that directly targets the needs of regional water management planning agencies on both sides of the international border.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMPA41C1329G
- Keywords:
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- 0850 Geoscience education research;
- EDUCATIONDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1637 Regional climate change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES