A. Students understand basic fluid and soil physical properties and can use these properties expressed in various units to address soil physics problems

B. Students understand the concept of water potential and how it is defined and used in soil physics

C. Students can explain the basic soil physical properties that affect the shape of the soil water retention and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity functions.

D. Students understand the importance of soil pore-size distributions and their importance to soil water retention and flow.

E. Students can derive the unsaturated Darcy equation, and apply basic soil water potential concepts and measurements to compute unsaturated soil water flow from soil water matric potential measurements.

F. Students understand the basic principles of soil chemical and gas transport, and soil heat flow.

G. Students can write independent laboratory reports following prescribed format requirements.

A. Students can place any water quality issue within the context of stakeholders, science, policy, and institutions.

B. Students can describe the complex issues facing the Sacramento River/San Joaquin River Delta, and articulate several different management solutions.

C. Students can describe how science and policy work together toward prevention of water quality impairments, identification of water quality impairments, and remediation of water quality impairments.

D. Students can articulate the role of mismatched environmental timescales and human timescales in creating water quality impairments (with legacy issues as one outcome).

E. Students can describe the inter-relationship between Total Maximum Daily Loads and self-healing processes in the environment.

F. Students can construct logical essay responses to prompts that require them to take a pro or con position.

A. Students can successfully describe the appropriate “control volume” (spatial scale) and the time scale of analyses while identifying and converting to common units the primary inputs, outputs and storage parameters of the problem.

B. Students appreciate the unique properties of water through review of its basic chemical and colligative properties and how some of these apply in the hydrologic cycle.

C. Students understand the origin and formation of precipitation and its forms as rain, sleet and snow. Students can complete and adjust rainfall records as needed and determine basin areal averages of data from raingage networks

D. Students understand the factors affecting the rainfall-runoff processes between total rainfall, abstraction losses to direct runoff and the formation of streamflow hydrographs.Students can compute direct runoff volumes and abstraction losses given hydrographs and storm data, as well as manipulate hydrograph information

E. Students understand the key processes affecting the net rate of water vapor transfer to atm. students can compute evaporation rates from evaporation pans, water bodies and plant ET

F. Students understand concepts of pressure and elevation heads as part of total head in static water systems.Students can compute pressures and forces on submerged objects and determine pressures in multi-fluid manometers.

G. Students develop a basic understanding of total head and the mechanics of water movement, pressures during steady flows in pipes and channels.Students can compute pressures, flowrates, headlosses, energy requirements, or generation in steady flow systems.

H. Students understand the origins of the hydraulic conductivity and gradient terms used in the Darcy equation from basic laminar flow hydraulics as well as appreciate the tensor qualities of hydraulic conductivity in the field.Students can compute steady flow rates though soils, estimate hydraulic conductivities and determine hydraulic gradients driving flow in saturated soils.

I. Students understand fundamentals of soil moisture retention and storage, concepts of capillary pressure head and measures of soil-water contents.Students can compute volumes of water retained or drained from soils and can compute soil water contents and hydraulic conductivities from capillary pressure heads.

J. Students consider the basic mechanisms of groundwater storage in confined and unconfined aquifers and the basic hydraulics equations associated with groundwater pumping or recharge in unconfined aquifers.Students can compute and use apparent specific yields to estimate volumes of groundwater storage available in shallow aquifers

A. Students learn the history of water in California, the different economic activities that have driven water use in California as well as the main regulations and issues related to water.

B. Student comprehend and apply the concept of Control Volume and estimate the primary variables that control the water flux in the control volume over time: inflows, outflows and change of storage.

C. Students understand the spatial and temporal mismatch of natural water availability and water demand, and recognize the role of water resources planning and management as a discipline that utilize methods for matching water supply and demand through time.

D. Students understand and estimate the factors affecting human water needs, focusing on urban and agricultural water demands.

E. Students understand and estimate the concept of Natural Flow Regime and its different flow components that help to sustain a healthy ecosystem.

F. Students understand how to integrate water supply and demand through water resources (optimization & simulation) modeling.

G. Students comprehend, quantify and compare the economic value of water management strategies by estimating the cost and benefits associated with each strategy.

H. Students understand the concept of uncertainty and apply probabilistic methods for including uncertainty in the estimation of the economic value of water management strategies.

I. Students develop a term project with the concepts learned in the class using the scientific method.

J. Students present and explain to their classmates the term project using the concepts learned in the class.

A. Students can describe fundamental electromagnetic radiation theories and the electromagnetic spectrum concept, and understand how they are relevant to remote sensing.

B. Students can describe and understand the basic elements of visual image interpretation.

C. Students can interpret aerial imageries proficiently.

D. Students can explain the concepts of spatial, spectral, radiometric, and temporal resolution and why they are important in designing and choosing sensors and platforms.

E. Students can comprehend the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and matters and describe the pathways of radiative energy in various settings of environment.

F. Students can articulate the spectral signatures of common land types and comprehend the dominant factors that affect reflectance in different spectrums.

G. Students can recognize and understand various camera configurations and multi-spectral imaging systems, and make a reasonable plan for a drone flight.

H. Students can perform and apply basic digital image processing skills, including: georectification, radiometric preprocessing, band ratio, and image classification, and understand the concepts behind them.

I. Students can conceptually design a creative remote sensing-based approach, given an example of environmental change issue, and present the key elements of the associated remote sensing project to solve the problem.

A. Students can successfully describe how light interacts with different surface materials, the physical principles that explain how light energy is absorbed by molecules, transmitted through translucent materials or reflected from the surface.

B. Students understand and can explain the major absorbing and scattering features that occur in plants, soils, minerals, and water that control the shape of their reflectance spectra in the optical region.

C. Students understand how light in the visible and near-infrared regions is absorbed by electronic transition processes and in the shortwave infrared and thermal infrared by vibrational processes in plants, soils and minerals.

D. Students understand the types of measurements and how they are made by different earth observing systems.

E. Students gain experience in standard preprocessing steps, including geo-registration, atmospheric calibration and data quality evaluation, using both radiative transfer and statistical methods of image analysis.

F. Students understand standard methods of image analysis through tutorials and problem sets and are able to interpret imagery.

G. Students can identify appropriate processing methods and understand and describe why different data types and analytical methods are used to address different types of environmental problems.

A. Students can define a Geographic Information system, are able to list its components and name several products that can be generated using GIS. They should be able to explain the difference between GI systems, GI science and GI software.

B. Students are able to name different projection systems, datums, spheroids, and coordinate systems; are able to explain what a geodetic datum is, which map projections are used and why, and what elements are used in a projection file to determine the projection system of a data set.

C. Students can explain the fundamental characteristics and differences of the two main data models used in GIS (e.g. vector and raster data), how this model can be acquired in a GIS software environment and what spatial analysis tools are typically used to modify, combine, extract or generalize these data types.

D. Students can explain the fundamental concepts of typology, its components, advantages and limitations as well as sources of error commonly associated with topology.

E. Students understandthe difference between digital and analog spatial data and the methods commonly used to convert analog into digital data and vice versa (e.g. digitizing, scanning, field data, printing).

F. Students can name different types of Global Navigation Satellite Systems, Global Positioning Systems, and remote sensing systems, their applications and data accuracies.

G. Students can compute basic statistical analyses with spatial data such as the mean, standard deviation, variance, minimum, maximum, median etc.

H. Students are able to search for and download geographic or spatial data from public online repositories and import and export different data types in GIS software systems. They know how to read metadata files and create metadata files for new data sets.

I. Students are able to combine spatial and tabular data in GIS to conduct spatial analysis of large data sets such as CENSUS data, SSURGO soils data, USGS hydrological data, NOAA remote sensing and weather data.

J. Students can derive topographic information from spatial elevation data including first and second order derivatives such as slope, aspect, curvature, topographic wetness indices etc.

A. Students understand the big water problems or challenges facing California and the world in the context of macro-hydrologic phenomena, history, government, and human perception.

B. Students understand the hydrologic cycle, the major stores of water, the fluxes between them, and the role of hydrology in water resources management.

C. Students know the historical hydrologic and societal events that led to the current water resources management systems of California and the western U.S., and understand how those systems impact current water resources challenges.

D. Students understand the primary roles of hydrology, ecology, agricultural sciences, political science, and law, in the contxt of the social milieu in solving water problems.

E. Students understand the key role of agriculture in water consumption, water quality, recharge and the food supply.

F. Studnets understand fundamentals of hydrology and water resources sufficiently to critically evaluate reliability of statements made about water in the popular press and in other forums and disciplines.

G. Students understand major sources of water contamination, factors affecting water quality sustainability, and some human health consequences of water quality.

H. Students can professionally and collegially discuss water problems and solutions in online and in-person discussion forums

I. Students can effectively communicate in writing about a water resources subject, appropriately incorporating and citing non-technical or technical literature.

A. Students understand typical irrigation systems used in CA.

B. Students understand basic soil-water properties and can appropriately sample soils for texture, bulk density and water content.

C. Students can determine basic directions of flow and estimate rates of soil-water movement.

D. Students understand plant-water potential, its application and how it is measured in the field.

E. Students can develop the soil-water balance necessary to develop an irrigation schedule for crops typically grown across CA.

F. Students understand the basic concepts of surface irrigation methods.

G. Students understand the basic concepts of sprinkler irrigation methods.

F. Students understand the basic concepts of low-volume (drip) irrigation methods.

G. Students can differentiate between soil salinity and sodicity and understand soil. Irrigation water quality salinity/sodicity effects on crops and infiltration.

A. Students can explain the basic principles of thermodynamic speciation, and distinguish between and solve steady state vs. non-steady state problems.

B. Students can construct, interpret, and use predominance diagrams for both open and closed systems to solve speciation problems.

C. Students can identify the role of biology in redox chemistry.

D. Students can use the Nernst equation to solve redox steady state and non-steady state problems.

E. Students can interpret Eh vs. pH diagrams.

F. Students can describe interactions between solution chemistry and solid phases, including weathering reactions and partitioning.

G. Students can use MINTEQ modeling to interpret chemical speciation in complex water samples.

H. Students can use simple mixing models to quantify sources of chemical species to water.

I. Students can explain the evolution of water chemistry from precipitation through the landscape into rivers and ultimately to the ocean.

J. Students can perform fundamental water chemistry analyses and produce high quality reports with appropriate interpretations

A. Students understand the hydrologic cycle concept and mass conversation considering inputs, outputs and changes of storage within it.

B. Students understand the various forms of precipitation and comprehend the main mechanisms giving rise to them. Students comprehend the ways precipitation is measured, understand its temporal and spatial variability, and gain an appreciation of precipitation extremes.

C. Students understand the intrinsic difficulties in measuring interception and depression storage and can compute them via simple empirical models.

D. Students understand fundamentals of soil moisture storage, capillary pressures, and conductivities. Students understand Hortonian and Dunne runoff generating mechanisms and can compute infiltration and runoff based on Horton’s infiltration capacity formula.

E. Students gain an appreciation of the spatio-temporal variability of evaporation and transpiration and can list the main factors that affect them. Students comprehend the concept of potential evaporation and understand the key components of the energy balance, comprehend what the Bowen’s ratio is, and can compute from such concepts evaporation from a water body. Students gain an appreciation of various mass transfer empirical equations for the calculation of evaporation based on vapor pressure gradients and wind speeds.

F. Students understand how streamflow is measured and displayed and comprehend the main characteristics of hydrographs. Students can list the components that make up a hydrograph: base flow, interflow, channel precipitation and direct surface runoff.

G. Students comprehend how approximating the input-output relation on a catchment via a time invariant linear system leads to the concept of the unit hydrograph. Students can compute streamflow outputs based on arbitrary precipitation inputs and unit hydrographs.

H. Students comprehend what is required to develop an equation that routes an input hydrograph into an output hydrograph. Students can route input hydrographs using the Muskingum method.

I. Students understand fundamental concepts of groundwater flow: saturated vs. unsaturated zones, aquifers vs. aquicludes/aquifuges, confined vs. unconfined aquifers, steady vs. unsteady situations, homogeneous vs. heterogeneous formations, isotropic vs. anisotropic flows, hydraulic conductivity, permeability, transmissivity, specific yield, storage coefficient, drawdown, etc.

A. Students can describe the axioms of probability, the concepts of conditional probability and independence, and comprehend the total probability and Bayes theorems. Students understand how to characterize discrete and continuous random variables and the relationship that exists between joint, conditional, and marginal distributions.

B. Students can explain the distinct distributions associated with the Bernoulli process: binomial, geometric and Pascal, and how such is related to the occurrence of floods. Students can list and understand the distinct distributions associated with the Poisson process, including the exponential and gamma distributions.

C. Students can describe other probabilistic models that include the Markov process and the beta, log-normal, power-law, and extreme-value distributions, and their usage in hydrology. Students can solve problems requiring probability estimations using the aforementioned distributions.

D. Students understand how rainfall is modeled using a Poisson and a Neyman-Scott process and can find suitable simulations of precipitation with them.

E. Students can compute moments, histograms and autocorrelation functions of hydrologic data and calibrate various autoregressive-moving average models. Students comprehend what the power spectrum of a time series is and know how to compute and interpret it based on fractional Brownian motion models.

F. Students understand how the Kalman filter weighs information in an optimal way, as used in hydrologic modeling.

G. Students can individually present a summary of a selected probabilistic topic and can collaborate in small groups to analyze streamflow information to produce professional-quality reports and presentations.

A. Students can conceptualize and write a water balance equation for any landscape setting on Earth accounting for water storage and flux components.

B. Student can understand and account for how biota influence the hydrologic cycle and vice versa in a variety of landscape settings on Earth.

C. Students can comprehend and evaluate how humans have impacted ecohydrology in a variety of landscape settings on Earth.

D. Students can describe and interpret the role of natural disturbance regimes in ecohydrology.

E. Students are proficient in the use of Microsoft Excel for hydrological analysis.

F. Students can describe the underpinnings of hydrological and ecological modeling at the watershed scale as well as explain how such models have been used to inform our understanding of ecohydrology.

G. Students gain experience in setting up and running lumped hydrological model of a small catchment.

H. Students can creatively conceive of a scientific experiment in hydrology and communicate the essential elements of the scientific method associated with a proposed experiment through writing and public speech.

I. Students can define hydrological terms introduced in the course.

A. Students understand the role of groundwater as a global resource to meet human health and economic needs as well as ecologic needs. Student also learn units, unit conversions, and keeping of significant digits in water budget and other computations

B. Students gain appreciation for the specific processes that link groundwater to other elements of the hydrologic cycle, being able to identify water pathways, under different climate and landscape conditions, to groundwater and from groundwater to other hydrologic compartments (recharge from vegetated soil-plant systems, from streams, snow, discharge to springs, streams, wells, groundwater-dependent ecosystems)

C. Students learn basic hydrogeologic definitions and understand fundamental concepts of groundwater occurrence and flow in different geologic materials(aquifer, aquitard, porosity, specific yield, storativity); students also gain an appreciation of different aquifer types, in California, the United States, and globally

D.Students successfully describe the appropriate “control volume” (spatial scale) and the time scale of analyses while identifying and converting to common units the primary inputs, outputs and storage parameters of the problem, for groundwater systems and associated input and output systems (root zone, stream-lake systems, land systems, watersheds)

E. Students can articulate the physical principles of groundwater flow based on principles of mass balance and energy balance; students recognize the groundwater flow equation and know in principle how to solve the flow equation

F. Students understand the major design guidelines of production wells, they gain a basic understanding of different well drilling and well development techniques; they learn to interpret well geophysical tests.

G. Students learn several solutions of the flow equation for specific cases involving one-dimensional flow and radial flow; students practice the application of these tools to real world problems at different scales – lab, well pumping test, and aquifer scale.

H. Students are introduced to water chemistry fundamentals relevant to groundwater quality, and to the principles of pollutant transport in groundwater

I. Students learn the principles of water management approaches, groundwater rights, groundwater protection

A. Students know the definition of risk, probability, and return period and can calculate base statistics (mean, variance, coefficient of variation) for time series data and conduct a frequency analysis by fitting a statistical distribution to the extreme events of time series data.

B. Students can determine the runoff from a design storm and consider runoff generation influencing factors such as land use, soils and antecedent moisture in the runoff estimation.

C. Students can explain the fundamental physical concepts (conservation of mass, energy and momentum) influencing water flow in open channels, culverts and pipes, chutes, spillways and natural channels and can distinguish between subcritical & supercritical, steady & unsteady, and laminar & turbulent flow regimes.

D. Students can use appropriate formulas for computing flow in open channels, pipes, culverts, chutes, weirs, and spillways and be able to explain the role that friction, viscosity, inertia and gravity have on flow volume, flow velocity and the transport of sediment.

E. Students can distinguish between different weir types and the concepts of head loss and friction loss used to correctly size pipes and culverts for different flow conditions.

F. Students can compute control volumes for design storms using concepts such as the triangular hydrograph superposition or the synthetic unit hydrograph, and they can route a given flood volume through ponds, wetlands, detention basins or reservoirs using level pool flood routing methods.

G. Students can list different environmental pollutants, describe their sources and know methods of how to control pollutant transport in different hydrologic systems. Studentknow basic regulatory standards enforced by County and state governments (e.g. storm water design manuals, NRCS guidelines such as TR-55).

H. Students can describe general watershed and soil water balance concepts can explain definition of water balance components and basic concepts of how to measure or estimate them.

I. Students can present work in concise, organized reports that are well structured, have a clear presentation of the motivation, objective(s), methods, results and discussion of results, provide informative figures, easy to follow calculations and are written in professional English.

A. Students understand the nature of subsurface geology and its effects on groundwater flow and solute transport in contexts of (a) contaminant remediation and (b) sustainability of groundwater quantity and quality.

B. Students can compute groundwater flow vectors and solute transport in simple and moderately complex subsurface geologic environments.

C. Students understand well hydraulics and its literature with sufficient depth to perform advanced analysis of field pumping tests under a variety of conditions.

D. Students can conduct field pumping tests of wells, including the installation of pressure transducers for monitoring groundwater levels.

E. Students understand the effects of spatial scale on the meaning and reliability of measured or estimated groundwater parameters for both groundwater flow and transport.

F. Students understand concepts of groundwater age, methods of estimating it, and the difference between groundwater flow and transport.

G. Students understand the principles behind basic models of groundwater flow and transport, and can explain the meaning of basic model results, and the role of models in groundwater science and water resources management.

H. Students achieve a deep understanding of confined and unconfined groundwater flow and storage phenomena at the local and regional scales.

I. Students understand groundwater chemistry evolution and its role in characterizing regional groundwater flow and local recharge.

J. Students can use data on geology, groundwater and surface water to develop a basin scale characterization of groundwater flow patterns, mechanisms of recharge and discharge, groundwater and surface water interaction, and potential pathways or mechanisms for contamination of drinking water supply wells.

K. Students improve proficiency in applying the scientific method by conducting experiments that include data collection and analysis, as well as quantitative and qualitative interpretation of the results.

A. Students can successfully describe the appropriate “control volume” (spatial scale) and the time scale of analyses while identifying and converting to common units the primary inputs, outputs and storage parameters of the problem.

B. Students understand the factors affecting the rainfall-runoff processes between total rainfall, abstraction losses to direct runoff and the formation of streamflow hydrographs.Students can compute direct runoff volumes and abstraction losses given hydrographs and storm data, as well as manipulate hydrograph information

C. Students understand concepts of pressure and elevation heads as part of total head in static water systems.Students can compute pressures and forces on submerged objects and determine pressures in multi-fluid manometers.

D. Students develop basic understanding of total head & the mechanics of water movement, pressures during steady flows in pipes and channels.Students can compute pressures, flowrates, headlosses, energy requirements, or generation in steady flow systems.

E. Students understand factors controlling peak flows from basins and how they affect application of the Rational and NRCS Curve Methods.Students can develop synthetic hydrographs, compute runoff times, peak flows and runoff volumes before and after watershed disturbance using either method.

F. Students understand application of the continuity equation to flow routing through detention ponds.Students can apply the Storage-Indication and Modified-Puls computation methods for flow routing and design of detention storage/WQ ponds.

G. Students consider basic processes of sedimentation and upflow velocities associated with detention pond water quality.Students can compute upflow velocities for range of particle sizes, determine required hydraulic retention times for particle settling and desired trapping efficiency

H. Students are introduced to County/regional (Sacramento area) storm water design manuals and commonly used design models (e.g. SWAT and TR-55) used in developing synthetic hydrographs and designing detention storage.

I. Students understand basic degradation processes and rate equations as affected by temperature, constituent and hydraulic retention times in the CW system.

J. Students can constructively work together on team design project and create technical report.

A. Students understand the factors that led to California’s hybrid system of water rights, and understand the importance California Acts & Provision requiring all uses of water to be reasonable and beneficial.

B. Students understand that law takes the form of statutes (by legislature), constitutions (State and federal), regulations (by executive agencies) and cases (in state and federal courts).

C. Students understand appropriative rights are from a particular stream, at a particular point of diversion, for described beneficial uses, at a described place of use.They understand the role of the State Water Resources Control Board in granting new appropriative rights, approving changes to post-1914 appropriative rights, and enforcing the reasonable use requirement of the California Constitution.

D. Students understand riparian rights are based on ownership of land abutting a stream and the limitations on such rights

E. Students comprehend that prescriptive rights arise from wrongfully taking water from an existing water right holder under certain conditions for five consecutive years.

F. Students understand the laws that protect instream resources such as recreation and fish and wildlife habitat, including Water Code sections, the Public Trust Doctrine, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

G. Students understandgroundwater rights andmanagement, including key cases and the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act

H. Students are introduced to the Federal Reclamation Act of 1902 and the Central Valley Project and learn that Water law is primarily a matter of state law, but federal statutes can preempt state law if Congress decides so.

I. Students understand that state and federal environmental statutes (e.g. CWA , ESA) affect the operation of water projects.

J. Students are exposed to the history of water law controversy in the Bay Delta, and across the state (e.g. San Joaquin River, Salton Sea).

K. Students will recognize the impacts that climate change is likely to have on California’s water system.

A. Students can recognize and design different types of scientific schemes to organize the measurement and sampling of water in the environment over time and space, including how to implement a hydrologic budget.

B. Students can measure and sample the storage and flux of natural waters and sediments in different settings in light of how they are commonly distributed in space and time.

C. Students can measure basic physical and chemical properties of natural waters and sediments in different settings in light of how they are commonly distributed in space and time.

D. Students can list and explain the pros and cons of different methods and technologies available for measurement and sampling in hydrology.

E. Students can define hydrological terms introduced in this course.

F. Students can examine and interpret Earth's freshwater aqueous and riparian landscapes using the scientific method, historical analysis, and professional practices.

G. Students can collaborate in small and large groups to produce high-quality reports on par with deliverables of professional hydrologists.