award, certificate, and medal. Criteria include the practical applicability of the organization’s work to arid and semi-arid areas; scientific, technological, or educational innovation; contributions to environmental improvements; beneficial socio-economic impact; and consistency with the goals of the International Hydrological Programme of UNESCO.

SAHRA director Jim Shuttleworth and CHRS director (and SAHRA founding director) Soroosh Sorooshian will accept the prize from the Director General of UNESCO in Budapest on World Science

NSF Science and Technology Center for Sustainability of semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas

www.sahra.arizona.edu520-626-6974

Ephemeral FlowA NEWSLETTER ABOUT SAHRA

W elcome to the fourth 2007 issue of Ephemeral Flow, a newsletter for sharing information within the SAHRA community. Ephemeral Flow is sent

to SAHRA researchers, staff, and students at all participating institutions every few months. Your contributions and suggestions are always welcome. Please send items to Mary Black at mblack@sahra.arizona.edu.

FEATURES

UPCOMING EVENTS

2007, no. 4

Dec. 3, 2007: OMS updates due

Dec. 10-14, 2007: AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA

Phillips has reason to be pleased with himself

SAHRA Earns UNESCO PrizeThe United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization has named SAHRA the co-winner of the 2007 International Great Man-made River Prize for Water Resources in Arid Zones, along with the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) at UC-Irvine.

The prize “rewards remarkable scientific research work on water usage in arid areas as well as areas subject to drought and also for the development of agriculture of the benefit of humanity and the environment.” It includes a monetary

Please let us know when you have news to share or a reason to brag. Students, let us know for example when you have completed your oral exam, defended your thesis/dissertation, or accepted a position in the real world (or even academia). Faculty members, are you offering a new course, hosting a workshop, leading a panel, editing a new journal? Anonymous or second-party tips on newsworthy announcements are also gratefully accepted.

Send comments, information, suggestions to mblack@sahra.arizona.edu.

CONTACT US!

Day, November 10, in the Hungarian Parliament. The award ceremony occurs on the final day of a major international meeting involving participation of senior science administrators from many countries (including NSF), and numerous heads of state and Nobel laureates.

The biennial prize “has been awarded to everyone involved in the SAHRA Center and reflects our numerous contributions to the hydrology of semi-arid and arid regions of the world and the level of international respect for the work we do,” Shuttleworth said.

Phillips Named AAAS Fellow

United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization

Congratulations to Fred Phillips of New Mexico Tech for his being selected by his peers as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in

late October. AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. This prestigious international honor recognizes

scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. Within the Geology and Geography section, Philips was elected “for his pioneering interdisciplinary work with interactions between hydrology, geochemistry, and geology, especially cosmogenic isotopes and surface-exposure dating,” his citation states. We are, as ever, impressed with Fred’s outstanding research and accomplishments. The announcement was made Oct. 26 and Phillips will be honored at the Fellows Forum on Feb. 16 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston.

See more Awards and Honors, pg. 3.

PAGE 2 2007, no. 4

PEOPLE

RESEARCHIf You’re Going to San FranciscoBrace yourselves for the annual exodus of SAHRA participants to San Francisco for the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. This year those of us perennially left behind expect if not a jug of wine (preferably in the form of a bottle), at least a crust of sourdough bread upon your return! Donations may be sent to or left at the UA’s Marshall Building, Room 549.

Many SAHRA-ites — too many to enumerate — will present posters

New SAHRA Students Welcome to Brian Billy, a new master’s degree student in hydrology and water resources at the UA. Brian is a member of the Navajo Nation, and is originally from northern New Mexico next to the Navajo Reservation. He received his undergraduate degree in civil engineering this past spring from the University of Utah. Brian will be focusing in the area of water policy and water distribution systems as they pertain to indigenous peoples. His primary advisor is Tom Maddock.

SAHRA is fortunate to have Mike Babcock joining the Global Water NewsWatch reporting effort. This is his first semester in the Arid Lands Resource Sciences Ph.D. program at the UA. Mike served in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso and is interested in doing additional field research in West Africa on wastewater management and policy, including an assessment of the

or talks at AGU. The following is a list of (known) SAHRA session presiders/moderators:

• Watershed Characterization and Modeling – Ty Ferre, UA; Thorsten Wagener, Penn State

• U.S. Contribution to International Hydrology – Jim Shuttleworth, UA

• Scenario Analysis and Stochastic Hydrology for Water Resources Applications – Javier González, University of Castilla-La Mancha; Juan Valdés, Holly Hartmann, and Steve Stewart, UA

• Advancing Hydrologic Predictability

in a Changing Environment Through Interdisciplinary Synthesis – Peter Troch, UA

• Scaling of Hydrological Processes in the Unsaturated Zone – Binayak Mohanty, Texas A&M

• Advancing Data Assimilation and Uncertainty Assessment for Improved Hydrologic Predictions – Yuqoing Liu, UA

• Remotely Sensed DTMs for Hydrogeomorphic Applications – Enrique Vivoni, New Mexico Tech

• Soil Moisture-Hydrology Interactions – Binayak Mohanty, Texas A&M

major actors involved in national and community-level decision-making. These decisions will eventually drive the development of decentralized, low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse systems (such as agriculture) for urban areas of rapidly growing West Africa. He holds an M.S. in environmental systems from Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.

New UA HWR Ph.D. candidate Ari Posner is also a Peace Corps alum, having worked in Guatemala with resource users and managers to develop and implement conservation programs and promote better resource stewardship. Ari has a B.S. in natural resource management from the UA, as well as a Master’s in urban planning. He has additional experience as a wildlife biologist for the Nez Perce National Forest, as a science teacher, and as a consultant with The Planning Center, a private land planning and landscape architecture firm. His research interest is in stormwater modeling to optimize spatial distribution of detention facilities at the watershed scale. A Sandia Fellow, Ari is working under the direction of Vince Tidwell from Sandia National Laboratories.

Students Who Finished DegreesGretchen Oelsner capped an impressive academic career at the UA this summer, earning her Ph.D. in hydrology and water resources under the mentorship

Brian Billy

Mike Babcock

Karletta Chief

of Paul Brooks. Her dissertation title was “Spatial and temporal variability in hydrologic controls on nutrient dynamics in the Upper Rio Grande.” Gretchen accepted a position with the EPA in Corvallis, Oregon and is already missed!

Congratulations to Karletta Chief, who recently completed her Ph.D. at the UA in hydrology and water resources, finishing her dissertation with the whopping title of “Soil air permeability and saturated hydraulic conductivity: Development of soil corer air permeameter, post-fire soil physical changes, and 3D air flow model in anisotropic soils.” Her primary advisor was Ty Ferre.

Karletta has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship with the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas, where she will be working in a new $1.2 million underground lysimeter lab with Michael Young on the Scaling Environmental Processes in Heterogeneous Arid Soils (SEPHAS) Project, which focuses on scaling subsurface and landscape-interface environmental processes. Karletta also served as master of ceremonies at the 2007 American Indian Science and Engineering Society annual meeting held Nov. 1-3 in Phoenix.

PAGE � 2007, no. 4

ADMINISTRATIVE NOTESAnnual Meeting In RetrospectSAHRA’s 7th Annual Meeting, held Oct. 10-12 at the Westward Look Resort in Tucson, was a most pleasant and interesting affair, as those of you who attended know. Coinciding with NSF’s annual site visit, the meeting highlighted SAHRA’s regional and international water management efforts. Keynote addresses were given by Eugene Stakhiv of the Army Corps of Engineers, José María Hinojosa of Comisión Nacional del Agua, and Carol Erwin of the Bureau of Reclamation. Discussion sections examined the hydrologic implications of climate change/drought and how to maximize the impact of science results on water management decisions. Field trips to B2 (the edifice formerly known as Biosphere 2) and Kartchner Caverns were enjoyed by participants on Saturday following the annual meeting.

First prize in the student poster competition went to Carlos Soto-Lopez (“Subsurface stream processes and spatiotemporal controls on nutrient cycling, Upper San Pedro River, $200); second prize to Joe Gustafson (“Quantifying the effects of storm track, topography, and vegetation on chemical loading to a montane snowpack, Valles Caldera National Preserve, NM,” $150); and third prize to Andy Hale (“Subsidies, irrigation, and agriculture production: Artificial support for an unsustainable system,” $100).

NSF’s Bruce Umminger checks out the digital lounge.

The food and venue were great...

Marty Frisbee explains his poster to Fred Phillips, while Tom Meixner lurks.

Kathy Jacobs spurs discussion at stakeholder session.

Vivoni Victorious otra VezThe much-decorated Enrique Vivoni had a good excuse for missing SAHRA’s annual meeting this year: he was in San Diego accepting the “Most Promising Engineer” award at HENAAC, the Hispanic Engineering National Achievement Award Conference. On hearing of the award Enrique said, “I am both honored to be receiving this and committed to serving as an example to the Hispanic

AWARDS AND HONORShigh school and college students that will be participating in the HENAAC conference.” Congratulations, Enrique!

Snow Falls for Climate ScientistSAHRA collaborator Gregg Garfin of the UA’s Climate Assessment for the Southwest was honored in October by Lester Snow, director of the California Department of Water Resources, with an inaugural Award for

Climate Science Services. The awards recognize ongoing assistance provided by members of the academic community who have worked closely with ‘DWR on planning for climate variability and change. Five individuals received recognition for their contributions to ‘DWR’s climate change and variability efforts and for their willingness to engage with resource managers and support information transfer from academia to those managers.

Kathy Jacobs spurs discussion at stakeholder session.

PAGE 4 2007, no. 4

Can We Have It All? The Answer Is…In late August, SAHRA’s Southwest Hydrology and the Arizona Hydrological Society jointly sponsored a regional conference in Tucson, provocatively titled “Sustainable Water, Unlimited Growth, Quality of Life: Can We Have It All?” Answers supplied by speakers and panelists fell in the “Yes, no, maybe, I don’t know” range. The event attracted 571 attendees, making it reputedly the largest water conference ever held in Arizona. It included over 100 speakers in four concurrent sessions, 50 poster presenters, five workshops, and three field trips.

Keynote speaker Peter Gleick, director of the Pacific Institute, said that human needs could clearly be met, since the

Baby NewsSAHRA Assistant Director for Science James Hogan and his wife Rebecca Miles are very pleased to announce the birth of their child, Eliza Brown Hogan. Eliza was ironically and conveniently born on Labor Day, Sept. 3, weighing in at 8 pounds and breaking the all-important 20” height barrier by ¾” — an important quality in a future basketball star.

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFERminimum basic water need is only 1% of all U.S. water consumed. He asserted that non-basic needs must be addressed in new ways, by expanding the definition of supply to include properly treated wastewater, pricing water properly

and fairly, expanding concepts of management to include small-scale facilities for treatment and re-use, and educating the public so as to “Make it hard to do the wrong thing and easy to do the right thing.”

SWH Publisher Betsy Woodhouse breathes easier at the symposium’s successful culmination.

Water for a Desert CityThis companion website to a SAHRA exhibit installed last spring at the Phoenix Zoo is now online at www.sahra.arizona.edu/phoenixzoo. Geared principally to residents of the Phoenix basin, the site aims to attract and to engage visitors of all ages, providing an interactive overview of

water issues in urban desert environments as well as the benefits of healthy riparian areas in arid regions. This web resource addresses where Phoenix’s water comes from, how it is treated, how demand is partitioned, and highlights constructed wetlands in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

R&R

Bad News, Good NewsHydrologists, take heart! The Southwest may be running out of water, but your immediate financial future is secure. Thanks go to Eleonora Demaria for pointing out a recent study from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that lists the position of hydrologist among the nation’s fastest-growing occupations. The 2006-07 edition of BLS’s Occupational Outlook Handbook shows an average salary of $59,809 for a master’s level hydrologist, with demand growth of 31.6 percent expected in this field by 2014. More information is available at www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ooh.pdf.

OMS Needs You and is Very Persistent!You will soon receive an email from Director Jim Shuttleworth asking you to update your online management system (OMS) record by Dec. 3. The email will include instructions on logging into the system. Your prompt attention to this critical if mildly annoying task is very appreciated. Slackers are assured there will be continued harassment until compliance is achieved, thank you very much!

ANNOUNCEMENTS