Triangulating from the cairns…
Water resources from the Colorado River have been dwindling over the past 100 years. We want to develop robust models to predict how water resources will change in the next few decades but need to know how all of the physical processes, from the bedrock through the surface and into the atmosphere, interact in the mountainous watersheds to produce streamflow. The Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign is a targeted effort to measure all of the known physical processes in the atmosphere that determine the water output of these watersheds simultaneously. SAIL will work in conjunction with the Watershed Function SFA which measures all of the known surface and sub-surface physical processes, and together, these efforts will develop a set of benchmarks for predictive models for water across the American West.