Campbell Lecture – Tyson Ochsner
October 5 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
“Soil Water is Water, Too: Developing the Oklahoma Hydronet as an Integrated, Statewide Hydrologic Monitoring System”
Zoom Meeting ID: 842 3667 7768; Passcode: 757642
A reception will be held after the seminar.
Tyson Ochsner earned a BS in Environmental Science at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in 1998, and a MS and PhD in Soil Science and Water Resources at Iowa State University in 2000 and 2003, respectively. From 2003-2008, he worked as a soil scientist for the USDA Agricultural Research Service in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2008, he joined the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at OSU, where he now serves as a Regents Professor. The mission of his soil physics research and teaching program is to help people better understand and appreciate the soil, the soil water balance, and the surface energy balance so that we can more wisely manage and conserve the land and water with which we have been entrusted. The primary focus is on multi-scale soil moisture monitoring and improved utilization of soil moisture data in agriculture, hydrology, and ecology.
About the lecture
Soil water is an underappreciated global water resource, and there is tremendous potential for improved soil water monitoring to provide diverse societal benefits. Unlocking that potential requires placing soil water measurements in an appropriate hydrologic context alongside measurements of water stored in groundwater aquifers, surface water lakes and reservoirs, and, in some cases, water stored in snowpack and ice. One such integrated water monitoring system being developed is the Oklahoma Hydronet, which is designed to enable improved early-warnings and better management of droughts and floods. This lecture will explain the motivations for this system, the research and development efforts that have contributed to the system design, and the data products being created. Examples of integrated water monitoring systems in other states and the potential for a national system will also be considered.
The Campbell Lecture was created to help further understanding of environmental soil science. It is named for Dr. Gaylon Campbell, who spent nearly 30 years as a professor of environmental biophysics and soil physics in the WSU’s Department of Crop & Soil Sciences. He retired from WSU in 1998 to become vice president of engineering at Decagon Devices, a manufacturer of biophysical research instrumentation. The lecture was created through gifts from Campbell Scientific, Inc., and Decagon Devices, Inc (now Meter Group).