In this dissertation I study the benefits that machine learning can bring to problems of Sustainable Development in the field of hydrology. Specifically, in Chapter 1 I investigate how predictable groundwater depletion is across India and to what extent we can learn from the model’s predictions about underlying drivers. In Chapter 2, I joined a competition to predict the amount of water in snow in the western United States using satellite imagery and convolutional neural networks. Lastly, in Chapter 3 I examine how cloud cover impacts the machine learning model’s predictions and explore how cloudiness impacts the successes and limitation of the popular uncertainty quantification method known as Monte Carlo dropout. Food production in many parts of the world relies on groundwater resources. In many regions, groundwater levels are declining due to a combination of anthropogenic abstraction, localized meteorological and geological characteristics, and climate change. Groundwater in India is characteristic of this global trend, with an agricultural sector that is highly dependent on groundwater and increasingly threatened by abstraction far in excess of recharge. The complexity of inputs makes groundwater depletion highly heterogeneous across space and time. However, modeling this heterogeneity has thus far proven difficult. In Chapter 1 using random forest models and high-resolution feature importance methods, we demonstrate a recent shift in the predictors of groundwater depletion in India and show an improved ability to make predictions at the district-level across seasons. We find that, as groundwater depletion begins to accelerate across India, deep-well irrigation use becomes 250% more important from 1996-2014, becoming the most important predictor of depletion in the majority of districts in northern and central India. At the same time, even many of the districts that show gains in groundwater levels show an increasing importance of deep irrigation. Analysis shows widespread decreases in crop yields per unit of irrigation over our time period, suggesting decreasing marginal returns for the largely increasing quantities of groundwater irrigation used. Because anthropogenic and natural drivers of groundwater recharge are highly localized, understanding the relationship between multiple variables across space and time is inferentially challenging, yet extremely important. Our granular, district-focused models of groundwater depletion rates can inform decision-making across diverse hydrological conditions and water use needs across space, time, and groups of constituents. In Chapter 2 I reflect on competing in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s snow water equivalent prediction competition (Snowcast Showdown). This project was a joint effort with Isabella Smythe and we ended the competition scoring roughly 45th out of over 1000 teams on the public leaderboard. In this chapter I outline our approach and discuss the competition format, model building, and examine alternative approaches taken by other competitors. Similarly I consider the success and limitations of our own satellite-based approach and consider future improvements to iterate upon our model. In Chapter 3 I study the black-box deep learning model built on MODIS imagery to estimate snow water equivalent (SWE) made for the competition discussed in Chapter 2. Specifically, I here investigate a major component of uncertainty in my remotely-sensed images: cloud cover which completely disrupts viewing of the surface in the visible spectrum. To understand the impact of cloud-driven missingness, I document how and where clouds occur in the dataset. I then use Monte Carlo dropout - a popular method of quantifying uncertainty in deep learning models - to learn how well the method captures the aleatoric errors unique to remote sensing with cloud cover. Next, I investigate how the underlying filters of the convolutional neural network appear using the guided backprop technique and draw conclusions regarding what features in the images the model was using to make its predictions. Lastly, I investigate what forms of validation best estimated the true generalization error in Chapter 2 using ordinary least squares (OLS) and the elastic-net technique. These three chapters show that machine learning has an important place in the future of hydrology, however the tools that it brings are still difficult to interpret. Moreover, future work is still needed to bring these predictive advancements to scientific standards of understanding. This said, the increases to accuracy brought by the new techniques can currently make a difference to people’s lives who will face greater water scarcity as climate change accelerates.

This project inserviced teachers for grades fourth through sixth on water conservation activities that they could implement with their students. Project Wet (Water Education for Teachers) was used as the basis for the workshops. All selected activities correlated with the California State Content Standards.

This study addresses the question: "What are the incentives and disincentives for conflict prevention and mitigation in the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation), and how do they factor into Reclamation's management of water in the western United States?" Incentives and disincentives for conflict prevention (i.e., actions taken to avoid conflict) and mitigation (i.e., actions taken to resolve, manage, or temper a conflictive situation after conflict has occurred) are identified through a survey and focus groups of Reclamation employees. The two dominant disincentives identified are a lack of resources and Reclamation's organizational culture--specifically its reliance on crisis management, water delivery tunnel vision, and being slow to change. Other disincentives include a lack of forward planning, the existence of an acceptable bandwidth or level of conflict, a perception that conflict is unavoidable or entrenched, politics, and limits on acceptable actions associated with the legal authorization of Reclamation projects. Fewer incentives for conflict prevention and mitigation were identified, but include, pressure from higher management, the promotion of collaboration within the Bureau, and a desire to avoid litigation. The institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework offers some insight into how these incentives and disincentives factored into the implementation of the Water2025 Initiative, and Reclamation’s experience with the Middle Rio Grande silvery minnow and the Endangered Species Act. As attributes of the community and rules-in-use, incentives and disincentives such as organizational culture, politics, funding availability, the desire to avoid litigation, the promotion of collaboration within the agency, and a lack of planning effort offer possible explanations of why Reclamation chose to act as it did. / Graduation date: 2012