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While the water cycle is a global problem, increased knowledge over
the continental US will lead to significantly better understanding and prediction of key
aspects, on scales ranging from storm-scale to climatic fluctuations. This improvement has
the potential to dramatically alter the public's ability to plan for and react to significant
weather events. We begin this effort by seeking to understand how water vapor, precipitation, and
land-surface hydrology interact across scales to define the hydrological cycle up to a continental
scale, and thus improve large-scale prediction models. A key area of research will be to better understand
and measure the components of the water cycle work together as a coupled system. Our long-term objectives are to:
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Translate our expertise on small-scale processes into effective representations of these processes at large scales;
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Improve our knowledge of the space and time distribution of water vapor across scales and its role in the initiation,
growth, and dissipation of cloud and precipitation systems;
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Conduct systematic analyses of precipitation processes with observations and models;
- Improve our basic knowledge and modeling capability of the hydrological cycle, and quantify runoff, soil moisture, and recycling
of moisture for various time and space scales;
- Provide a physical basis for the hydrological cycle and associated extremes in precipitation related to droughts and floods
and also climate change;
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Improve the treatment of the water cycle in models across scales, from cloud-resolving to global;
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Improve the prediction of the water cycle using expert systems in the 1-12 hr interval,
where a critical gap exists between observations and the predictive skill of models.
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