The Water Cycle across Scales

The transport and transformations of water substance in the global water cycle are of fundamental and primary importance for understanding the ecosystems, the land surface hydrology that supports them, and the management of water resources for humans. In particular, advances in multipolarization and multifrequency radar, acoustical sounding systems, eye-safe lidar systems, remote sensing platforms such as EOS (NASA Earth Observing System), TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission), and the Global Positioning System, and cloud microphysical measurement devices have each contributed important linkages in the chain of convective processes. Similar collaborative strategies can and are being implemented within the scientific community to address additional multiscale processes in land surface hydrology, the coupled ocean-atmosphere climate system, tropospheric-stratospheric exchange processes, and atmospheric (e.g., weather and climate) observational networks.