Many of the scientific and societal challenges in understanding and preparing for global environmental change rest upon our ability to understand and predict the water cycle change at large river basin, continent, and global scales. However, current large‐scale land models (as a component of Earth System Models, or ESMs) do not yet reflect the best hydrologic process understanding or utilize the large amount of hydrologic observations for model testing. This paper discusses the opportunities and key challenges to improve hydrologic process representations and benchmarking in ESM land models, suggesting that (1) land model development can benefit from recent advances in hydrology, both through incorporating key processes (e.g., groundwater‐surface water interactions) and new approaches to describe multiscale spatial variability and hydrologic connectivity; (2) accelerating model advances requires comprehensive hydrologic benchmarking in order to systematically evaluate competing alternatives, understand model weaknesses, and prioritize model development needs, and (3) stronger collaboration is needed between the hydrology and ESM modeling communities, both through greater engagement of hydrologists in ESM land model development, and through rigorous evaluation of ESM hydrology performance in research watersheds or Critical Zone Observatories. Such coordinated efforts in advancing hydrology in ESMs have the potential to substantially impact energy, carbon, and nutrient cycle prediction capabilities through the fundamental role hydrologic processes play in regulating these cycles.

We study the intermittency of fluid velocities in porous media and its relation to anomalous dispersion. Lagrangian velocities measured at equidistant points along streamlines are shown to form a spatial Markov process. As a consequence of this remarkable property, the dispersion of fluid particles can be described by a continuous time random walk with correlated temporal increments. This new dynamical picture of intermittency provides a direct link between the microscale flow, its intermittent properties, and non-Fickian dispersion.

As part of a long-range study of vortex rings, their dynamics, interactions with boundaries and with each other, we present the results of experiments on thin core rings generated by a piston gun in water. We characterize the dynamics of these rings by means of the traditional equations for such rings in an inviscid fluid suitably modifying them to be applicable to a viscous fluid. We develop expressions for the radius, core size, circulation and bubble dimensions of these rings. We report the direct measurement of the impulse of a vortex ring by means of a physical pendulum.