PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

It's March

President's Message, March 2020

It's March and my mind automatically turns to March Madness. Not just the NCAA basketball tournaments, but the time of year when everything seems to be popping. For AWRA staff and conference planning volunteers it’s a mad-dash to ensure our members and other attendees have the best experience possible at our upcoming 2020 Geospatial WaterTechnology Conference in Austin, Texas (March 23-26, 2020). I do hope you’ll join us. It promises to be a fantastic opportunity to hear from our colleagues around the country about cutting-edge technology devoted to understanding, analyzing, and sharing information about complex systems critical to water resources management. Please check out the in-depth program assembled by our terrific planning committee and register for the conference if you haven’t already done so. We’ll also be paying tribute to David Maidment for his outstanding technological contributions to the water resources community. A full day Maidment Symposium sponsored by CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.) will immediately follow the AWRA specialty conference.

Meanwhile, our conference volunteers from the Florida AWRA state section are hard at work generating interest and coordinating details for the AWRA Annual Water Resources Conference November 9-12 in Kissimmee, Florida. The location offers terrific opportunities for field trips, special sessions, and of course family vacations for those able to stay a little longer or arrive early. Keep your eyes open for the Call for Abstracts coming out soon!

As always, I hope you’ll reach out to your AWRA State Sections and  Student Chapters and become engaged with them as well as AWRA national. We’ve reinstituted regular check-in calls with both and hope that we can build an even stronger network to share information and ideas in these critical times. Some of our sections have fantastic events planned. Please contact us for more information on how to reach or start a state section or student chapter. These are great ways to share your work and get new input from the work of others. Our publications, JAWRA and Water Resources IMPACT Magazine, of course, are another great way to share your research, as are our webinars.

We are also working hard on some association basics, including updating and improving our website, our membership notification and renewal processes, and smoothing out technological and organizational glitches as we evolve as an organization. All hopefully will contribute to better experiences for you, our members.

I hope everyone will enjoy this edition of IMPACT. A special thank you to our guest editors, Venkatesh Merwade and Lilit Yeghiazarian, for gathering articles and working closely with our technical editor Michael Campana to put together another great edition. I want to thank all those involved in IMPACT's production for your hard work behind the scenes, including our topnotch AWRA staff. A shout-out also goes to our terrific 2020 Geospatial Water Technology Conference planners. They have done a wonderful job putting together the conference program and getting ready for the conference in Austin, TX March 23-26, 2020. I hope to see everyone in Austin later this month.

I hope I can count on your continued support as we lay the foundation for a great year. And good luck to all with the madness that is March. (I myself have my eyes on the UofO women’s bball team).

We always appreciate hearing from you. Please feel free to correspond with me directly at [email protected].