Today Cody participated in the Spring Commencement Graduate Ceremony after having his final thesis approved by the Graduate School earlier in the month.  Way to go Cody!

Tomorrow is World Water Day.  This event is held annually on 22 March as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.  This year we are celebrating the United Nations International Year of Water Cooperation.  Happy World Water Day!

Indeed, perfect conditions began to emerge as the week neared to an end. As the event approached, so did the arrival of Suzanne, a student from the University of Utrecht, who was coming to help with melt sampling and start a project of her own. She arrived Saturday evening and Sunday the sampling push started. Quite the quick turn around from trans-atlantic travel to hiking heavy loads into the mountains of New Hampshire!!

Suzanne on day 2 of sampling!

On day one we set up ISCOs and put vacuums on the collection bottles for our Prenart soil water samples. The next day was the first of three big sampling days.  We collected samples from ISCOs, 30 prenart lysimeters, and any of the 15 wells at those sites that had a water table.  In addition we collected from 3 snow lysimeters installed throughout the catchment. Brad, our field tech, was able to help on the first day, which really made things move a lot quicker.

At the end of day 2, we got another field assistant, albeit an unintentional one. My girlfriend, Jennie, came up for Virginia Tech’s spring break to see the mountains of New Hampshire and do some skiing and ice climbing. Instead she was recruited to take hundreds of water samples! She was a great sport about it and an even better field tech.  It turns out we were very lucky she was around. After the first day of samples we had about 100 that needed

Jennie’s surprise field day began with promise and ended wet, cold, and with a ton of samples!

pH run as soon as possible. This meant we needed one person in the lab running pH’s and as many as possible out in the watershed collecting samples. Without Jennie, ‘as many as possible’ would have been 1 (Me). The extent of sampling we were able to pull off would not likely have been possible without a third person.

Tuesday Jennie and I collected samples all day in a steady, drenching rain with temperatures hovering in the mid 30′s. We were soaked thru within an hour. We took turns running up and down slopes in the catchment to stay warm at sampling sites and wrung out our gloves often in a feeble attempt to keep our hands warm. Despite all of this, it was a very successful day. We collected all soil and snow lysimeter sites and hourly samples from an ISCO on the main stem of Paradise Brook in watershed 3 and a side stream. Additionally we got a third ISCO running on a not yet flowing tributary. This involved hacking through a couple feet of

Digging through ice to try and find a stream.

snow and ice to get down to the stream bed, but we got samples!!!

The final day was 50 degrees F and sunny. We collected all sites and all three ISCOs for an incredibly diverse and dense sample set! But coming down from the catchment wasn’t the end of it. We were up until 1:30am running pH’s and labeling and organizing samples, getting them ready to be sent out for analysis.

On Thursday we awoke from our long night and drove to Durham, NH to drop about 300 samples off at the Forest Service lab in Durham.  That was that. It was an incredible amount of work, but hopefully will yield some fun and interesting data!

Pumping well samples during the main event. Soaked through but getting samples!!

http://us-japanhydro.org/photos/

Kris on a forest road at Reynolds Homestead.

Kris Brown attended the 17th Biennial Southern Silvicultural Research Conference in Shreveport, LA last week and won a best student presentation award.  Congratulations Kris!

Participants of the US-Japan Joint Seminar on Hydrology and Biogeochemistry – March 2013.

I had a great week with colleagues from the US and Japan at the 4th US-Japan Joint meeting on hydrology.  We had a productive week that set us on course for some cross-site synthesis research and paper writing.  Thank you to everyone for making it fun and productive.  The photo above is from a hike we went on as group on the north side of Oʻahu during a field trip to visit one of the island’s drinking water access tunnels.

Change in winter climate will affect dissolved organic carbon and water fluxes in mid-to-high latitude catchments (pages 700–709), Hjalmar Laudon, Doerthe Tetzlaff, Chris Soulsby, Sean Carey, Jan Seibert, Jim Buttle, Jamie Shanley, Jeffrey J. McDonnell and Kevin McGuire

Catchments on the cusp? Structural and functional change in northern ecohydrology (pages 766–774), Doerthe Tetzlaff, Chris Soulsby, Jim Buttle, Rene Capell, Sean K. Carey, Hjalmar Laudon, Jeff McDonnell, Kevin McGuire, Jan Seibert and Jamie Shanley

Thank you to Professor Doerthe Tetzlaff for leading this group of rambunctious, cantankerous scientists. We had a great time over the course of the 3 year long North-Watch project and I will miss our workshops dearly.  The group was fun, stimulating and quite productive – everything you would hope to find in a collaboration and working group.  I hate to see it end!

There are great points made in this blog post on the use of acknowledgements in talks.  This blog generally has great advice.

“Last words are our strongest. That’s why the punchline comes at the end of the joke and the conclusions at the end of a presentation. The conclusion slide is the ‘take home message’ that we want our audience to soak up. So we should leave that message in front of them for as long as possible. Even while people are asking questions—let them stew on your conclusions.”

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Hydrologists from winter Coweeta meeting (LtoR: Larry Band, Ryan Emanuel, Rhett Jackson, Kevin, Wayne Swank, Jeff McDonnell, and Tim Burt).

We had a great meeting this week at the Coweeta Hydrologic Lab.  Rhett Jackson organized this photo of the hydrologists at the meeting.  It is really amazing to think of the rich research history of this place and what it has meant to the field of hydrology.