Reliable access to water resources is essential for the resiliency of healthy and robust societies. The reliance on water supply to energy systems, coupled with various stressors that play out over various time and length scales, render California water resiliency particularly vulnerable. Many regions are experiencing a loss of snowpack, an increase in aridity, and extreme weather events. These hydrological perturbations alter water supply and demand, requiring fundamental shifts in how and where water is sourced, distributed and stored. Grid modernization, renewable energy adoption and aggressive California greenhouse gas reduction targets will similarly dramatically alter the generation, distribution and storage of energy, influencing water strategies that rely on energy. Increased population growth, land use change and aging infrastructure further exacerbate the resliency of California water.<br/><br/>While future trends present daunting challenges, they also constitute opportunities for development of a new class of resilient water strategies. We will first review California water challenges and discuss associated research gaps. We will then describe several approaches that as an ensemble have the potential to offer water resiliency in an energy constrained and uncertain climate future. We discuss first-principle investigations of processes associated with advanced desalination, toward water generation at dramatically lower cost and energy use compared to conventional approaches. We describe the development of the first scale-adaptive strategy to mechanistically simulate how watersheds respond to droughts, floods and other episodic hydrological perturbations, and its potential use for managing downgradient water quantity and quality. New modeling and monitoring approaches are being developed to predictably guide groundwater banking strategies that are tuned to match water delivery and demands. New approaches are underway that flexibly combine diverse data set and full physics models to characterize the reliability, energy footprint, and water quality dimensions of California urban water supply systems. These scientific investigations, which span ~eleven orders of magnitude in length scales, are enabled by the development of computational tools that facilitate knowledge extraction using wildly diverse and multi-scale water data. While S&T approaches are being developed using Western US testbeds, several may have global impact.

California water resiliency in an energy constrained and uncertain climate future

254th National Meeting (2017)

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