The Studies of Precipitation, Flooding, and Rainfall Extremes across Disciplines (SPREAD) Workshop: An Interdisciplinary Research and Education Initiative

Floods and flash floods are, by their nature, a multidisciplinary problem: they result from a convergence of atmospheric conditions, the underlying topography, hydrological processes, and the built environment. Research aimed at addressing various aspects of floods, on the other hand, often follows paths that do not directly address all of these fundamental connections. With this in mind, the NSF-sponsored Studies of Precipitation, Flooding, and Rainfall Extremes Across Disciplines (SPREAD) workshop was organized and held in Colorado during the summers of 2013 and 2014. SPREAD brought together a group of 27 graduate students from a wide variety of academic disciplines, but with the unifying theme being research interests in extreme precipitation or flooding. During the first meeting of the workshop, groups of graduate student participants designed interdisciplinary research projects that they then began work on over the intervening year, with the second meeting providing a venue to present their results. This article will outline the preliminary findings of these research efforts. Furthermore, the workshop participants had the unique and meaningful experience of visiting several locations in Colorado that had flooded in the past, and then visiting them again in the aftermath of the devastating 2013 floods. In total, the workshop resulted in several fruitful research activities that will advance understanding of precipitation and flooding. Even more importantly, the workshop fostered the development of a network of early-career researchers and practitioners who will be “multilingual” in terms of scientific disciplines, and who are poised to lead within their respective careers and across the scientific community.