Bringing Water Science to the People of Illinois

We’ve been neglecting the blog lately, which would be sad in and of itself, if it didn’t also mean that we have been out of the office doing vast amounts of outreach. What kinds of outreach, you say? We’re so glad you asked.

You may have noticed our many postings about the Drought Workshop at the Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System. What you may not have noticed is that this workshop was developed because of outreach requirements on a research grant.  Last spring, Dr. Ximing Cai approached us with the idea of a drought workshop, because he was concerned that his research on forecasting and climate wasn’t reaching the people who needed it most, namely, farmers and water resources managers. Since the mission of the Illinois Water Resources Center is to bring watershed science to the people of Illinois, we were excited to help Dr. Cai reach a broader audience.  And we’re happy to report that we did host a broad audience. Members of Illinois’ agriculture, economics, and natural resources departments joined with researchers for the University of Illinois and the Prairie Research Institute to discuss what information they needed to help them do their jobs during droughts. Over 30 people attended the workshop, and this was during a partial federal government shutdown that kept three of our speakers at home. While we missed their input, it was encouraging to see how many people are interested in managing drought more effectively in Illinois. Stay tuned for a report and white paper on this topic to be published on our website.

The other task that’s been keeping us so busy (including talking about it in our sleep, by one report) is nutrient pollution. Illinois is home to an impressive agriculture scene and a lot of people, most of whom live in the Chicago area. These two factors mean that Illinois puts a lot of nitrogen and phosphorous into our waterways in the form of escaped fertilizer and treated wastewater. These nutrients eventually make their way down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they greatly contribute to the massive hypoxia, or dead, zones that have been appearing there for over 30 years. The State of Illinois is now working on reducing this form of pollution by developing a nutrient reduction strategy with the aid of a group of stakeholders. Led by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the Illinois Department of Agriculture, the stakeholder group includes representative from wastewater treatment professionals, the agricultural community, and environmental groups, and has become large. Which is where we come in. Big groups require a lot of organization to make them run efficiently and still let everyone’s ideas and opinions be heard. Consequently, IWRC is facilitating the working group meetings to ensure that Illinois drafts a workable strategy to meaningfully reduce nutrient pollution in a way that addresses everyone’s concerns and includes the expertise of all the group members. As you can imagine, curating the content generated by nearly 50 people has taken a lot of work, but it promises to be a rewarding experience, and we hope to see the finished project next summer. For more information on the Nutrient Reduction Strategy, you can visit the IEPA website.

To round out our outreach efforts, we’ve also started preparing for Illinois Water 2014! If you have ideas of activities, sections, and events you’d like to see included, please contact us.    

Drought Workshop Notes

We're excited to see that our Drought Workshop was written up on the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant blog. Check it out here to find out how the day went. We'll be posting the final notes and ideas from the workshop soon. Until then, if you have additional ideas post-workshop (or couldn't make it) feel free to email us with your comments to be incorporated into our final publication.

Water Notes: A Few of Our Favorite Things

We read a lot of stuff about water, and sometimes we forget to pass the fun along to you. This week, we’re starting a new tradition and making up for that oversight by sharing a few of our favorite blogs, websites, and tools. If you have great additions to our list, be sure to share in the comments or on Twitter @IllinoisWater or Facebook.

by Irene Miles

• Unwantedmeds.org hosts the UpClose series in which they interview scientists about their research. You know how much we love chatting about science, and this is fun and accessible. Since Unwantedmeds focuses on safe disposal of unwanted or expired medicine, the interviews generally deal with what happens to the environment when pharmaceuticals escape. The collection so far includes an engineer, a toxicologist, and a microbial ecologist. We hear rumors that there will be more soon.
• Did you know that Illinois has sister lakes and rivers?  We do, in Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, and China, to name a few. The goal of the Sister Rivers and Lakes initiative is to share innovative solutions to the problems these water bodies share with those in Illinois. Some of the strategies used by Illinois to address state water resource dilemmas include the Mud-to-Parks program and the Clean Water Initiative. 
• One of the most helpful sites we follow is the blog of State Climatologist Jim Angel. Dr. Angel keeps us up-to-date on drought, tornado drought, the average temperatures of the season we’re in, and lots of other useful information about Illinois weather and climate. We highly recommend adding Illinois State Climatologist to your blog roll.
• Speaking of weather, the Midwest Regional Climate Center’s webpage is also fantastic. Not only can you look up the maximum snow in one month in Champaign County (it was 32 inches in March of 1906), but you can also look up extreme temperatures, past weather events, drought, and the weather on the day you were born!

Talking Drought

As we reach the end of a dry, and now hot, August, we’re reminded of how very close drought always is to states with a large agriculture sector. In fact, State Climatologist Dr. Jim Angel tweeted today that this is the driest August since 1893, and in Champaign County, we’ve only received 0.36 inches of rain. We normally get about four.

We’re not the only ones thinking about drought. Dr. Ximing Cai, who provided the impetus for our Drought Workshop, explains to me why he’s concerned about these drought cycles and what he hopes this fall’s workshop will accomplish.

So what inspired this workshop?

People are forgetting the 2012 Drought, although the damage was record-breaking. More attention is needed to prepare for a revisit of 2012 Drought. It is hard for any scientist to claim that his or her research helped with the drought damage reduction during the 2012 Drought, even though numerous scientists have been conducting drought-related research. Why? It seems that the research community does not really understand the needs of farmers and stakeholders for drought mitigation; meanwhile the latter may not understand the possible value of drought research. I hope this workshop can illustrate this gap and enhance the communication between research and practice.

How would you like to see the workshop used to address data needs and research gaps in Illinois?

Policy makers have been quiet and still keep a crisis management and business as usual [approach], i.e., depending on tactical measures and ignoring strategic ones. Which begs the question, should risk management implementation be given serious consideration? Research should provide support for shifting crisis management to combined risk and crisis management. I hope the workshop attendants, especially the stakeholder representatives, can share some specific opinions and suggestions to this issue, which is important for research, policy, and the public.

Why are you interested in drought in your own research?

I started drought research since I joined UIUC. My group has been studying how climate change might affect drought frequency, intensity, and duration using the state-of-art climate change prediction models. We further examined how meteorological drought propagates to hydrologic and agricultural drought. Following that, we address the question in terms of strategic measures for drought mitigation: should we do something now or should we wait and see? Specifically for Illinois, we find some changes that are unfavorable for the traditional rain-fed agriculture: precipitation declines in the crop growth season while increasing in the post- and prior seasons, along with increased temperature. A big question facing the agriculture community is: should large-scale irrigation be allowed to maintain the corn-belt or should we change the land from corn-belt to wheat-belt (which grows in winter-spring season)? More frequent drought visits will force the communities to make the choice now rather than “kick it down the road”. We need researchers, stakeholders, and policy makers to discuss the big decisions and their implications for additional research activities, policy changes, and practices.

Want to join in this discussion? Join us October 1, 2013 in Peoria, IL to discuss these questions and more at our Drought Workshop. To register or for more information, please see our blog post on this topic. 

Drought Workshop

The Drought of 2012 made some unpleasant new records in Illinois history. Shipping nearly halted on the Mississippi, drinking water supplies dwindled in the City of Decatur, crops withered, and Lake Michigan reached its lowest level ever recorded.

Drought of 2012--photo by Irene Miles

But it also inspired the development of collaborations among the Illinois academic community and the state and federal agencies working on water management. To help foster these connections, the Illinois Water Resources Center is hosting a Drought Workshop on October 1, 2013 as part of the festivities at the Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System in Peoria, IL. The goals of the workshop are to identify the data needs and research gaps for agency management of drought and develop a white paper of possible solutions and actions.

List of Speakers

• Overview—Dr. Brain Miller, Director, Illinois Water Resources Center/ Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant
• Deficiencies in Illinois’s Drought Response Authorities—Arlan Juhl, Director, Office of Water Resources, Illinois Department of Natural Resources
• Challenges in Forecasting and Monitoring the 2012 Drought—Dr. Jim Angel, State Climatologist, Illinois State Water Survey
• USGS Water Monitoring to Support the State of Illinois Governor’s Drought Response Task Force during the Drought of 2012—Gary Johnson, Chief, Hydrology Data Section, Illinois Water Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey
• NRCS Needs and Recommendations for Drought Related Agricultural Research—Kerry Goodrich, State Resource Conservationist, Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture
• Drought Management Strategies for the Chicago Metro Area—Dr. Martin Jaffe, University of Illinois Chicago/ Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant
• The Value of Hydroclimatic Forecasts for Agricultural Drought Mitigation and Preparedness—Dr. Ximing Cai, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Workshop attendance is FREE, but does require registration. To register, contact the Illinois Water Resources Center (iwrc@uiuc.edu) or choose the Illinois Drought Workshop option under the registration page of the Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System. 

The Workshop will be held from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel in Peoria, IL, room number forthcoming. Full information regarding the Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System is available here.