Boulder Team Wins International Water Prize

Oct. 29, 2014
Boulder scientists has been recognized for innovations related to water resources

The research team from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has worked for the past five years to develop a way to use GPS technology to measure soil moisture, snow depth and vegetation water content.

The work has won a 2014 Creativity Prize from the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water.

Braun and his colleagues—Kristine Larson and Eric Small at CU Boulder and Valery Zavorotny at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory—won the prize for developing a new observational technique that takes advantage of data from high-precision GPS stations.

Although GPS instruments at these stations were installed for other purposes (by geoscientists to measure plate tectonic motions and by surveyors to measure land boundaries), the Boulder research group was able to isolate GPS signals that reflected near the instruments’ antennas to produce daily measurements of soil moisture, vegetation water content, and snow depth. The group named the technique GPS Interferometric Reflectometry (GPS-IR).

Because there are currently over 10,000 such GPS stations operating around the world, the extension of this method to even a subset of these sites would significantly enhance the ability to measure the water cycle.

Currently, the team uses the GPS-IR technique to analyze data streams from existing GPS networks within the western United States. Scientists and government agencies can use their data products, available at the research team’s web portal, to improve monitoring and forecasting of hydrologic variables.

“The GPS-based estimates represent a larger sampling area than traditional point measurements gathered in the field,” said Small, a professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Geological Sciences. “This provides information that is particularly useful for applications such as tracking the amount of water stored in mountain snow pack.”

The research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

GPS-IR is based on reflected signals, which are a source of errors that have plagued the primary users of GPS technology since its inception. Larson will accept the award at a ceremony in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Dec. 1, 2014.

The 2014 Creativity Prize, worth $266,000, was split between the Boulder-based GPS-IR group and scientists at Princeton University studying drought.

Several Colorado researchers have been recognized with the International Prize for Water since its inception in 2004.

Previous winners include: 

  • Kevin Trenberth and Aiguo Dai, Surface Water Prize, 2012 (National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colo.)
  • Chih Ted Yang, Surface Water Prize, 2008 (Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, Colo.)

Source: Council for the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water