Hydrologic science and social problems

Inverse Problems in Hydrologic Radiative Transfer

Optically, phytoplankton reveal their presence through their influence on the inherent optical properties (IOP’s) of the water. The main effect of phytoplankton is to increase the absorption of light by virtue of the strong absorption by their photosynthetic (chlorophyll a) and accessory pigments. A secondary effect is to increase the backscattering coefficient of the medium in a manner that de...

Social science. Computational social science.

Demography as social science and policy science

Science and social responsibility*

Science in the aggregate has not lived up to its promise to work for the benefit of society as a whole. This problem stems from the narrow perspectives that basic and applied researchers typically take to their work. Among the barriers to broadening those perspectives, the most tractable is the myth that the overriding purpose of science in human affairs is prediction; that such predictions are...

Computational provenance in hydrologic science: a snow mapping example.

Computational provenance--a record of the antecedents and processing history of digital information--is key to properly documenting computer-based scientific research. To support investigations in hydrologic science, we produce the daily fractional snow-covered area from NASA's moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS). From the MODIS reflectance data in seven wavelengths, we estima...