Distributed Modeling: from REA to hillslope-resolving

Eric Wood's contributions to distributed modeling were partially motivated by a desire to test the REA hypothesis as well as by a desire to demonstrate the impact of remotely sensed data on hydrologic prediction.  In this brief talk, I will review the advances in distributed modeling, such as high-resolution terrain, distributed hydrometeorological forcings and soil-vegetation parameters, high performance computing and communications, data assimilation, coupled land-atmosphere modeling, that laid the foundation for macroscale and ultimately "hyperresolution" modeling.  These foundational advances exemplify the 3^rd paradigm in hydrology and are moving us towards embracing a 4^th paradigm in hydrology, where we enable a rigorous confrontation of our hypotheses embodied within our models with a range of data types across many locations and spatial-temporal scales.