CUAHSI Hydrologic Information Systems

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CUAHSI Hydrologic Information Systems

• By David R. Maidment
• With support from many collaborators Ilya
  Zaslavsky, Reza Wahadj, Chaitan Baru, Praveen
  Kumar, Michael Piasecki, Rick Hooper, Jon Duncan,
  David Tarboton, Jeff Horsburgh, Venkat Lakshmi,
  Chunmaio Zheng, Xu Liang, Yao Liang, Ken Reckhow,
  Upmanu Lall, LeRoy Poff, Dennis Lettenmaier,
  Barbara Minsker,
• And many graduate students and post-docs
  Venkatesh Merwade, Tim Whiteaker, Jon Goodall,
  Gil Strassberg, Ben Ruddell, Luis Bermudez, Bora
  Boran,

Thanks to everyone for all their help!
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CUAHSI-Hydrologic Information Systems
UCAR

• CUAHSI Consortium of Universities for the
  Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc
• Formed in 2001 as a legal entity
• Program office in Washington (5 staff)
• Rick Hooper is Executive Director

Unidata
Atmospheric Sciences
Ocean Sciences
Earth Sciences
CUAHSI
NSF Geosciences Directorate
HIS
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CUAHSI Member Institutions
101 Universities as of November 2005
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CUAHSI HydroView Components
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Environmental Cyberinfrastructure

• Part of NSF Cyberinfrastructure program
• CUAHSI Hydrologic Information Systems is one of
  several pilot projects CUAHSI, CLEANER, ORION,
  NEON, ..

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CUAHSI HIS Partner Institutions
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HIS Goals

• Hydrologic Data Access System better access to
  a large volume of high quality hydrologic data
• Support for Observatories synthesizing
  hydrologic data for a region
• Advancement of Hydrologic Science data modeling
  and advanced analysis
• Hydrologic Education better data in the
  classroom, basin-focused teaching

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HIS Goals

• Hydrologic Data Access System better access to
  a large volume of high quality hydrologic data
• Support for Observatories synthesizing
  hydrologic data for a region
• Advancement of Hydrologic Science data modeling
  and advanced analysis
• Hydrologic Education better data in the
  classroom, basin-focused teaching

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HIS User Assessment (Chapter 4 in Status Report)
Which of the four HIS goals is most important to
you?
Data Access
Observatory support
Science
Education
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CUAHSI Hydrologic Data Access System(HDAS)
NASA
NCDC
EPA
NWS
USGS
Observatory Data
A common data window for accessing, viewing and
downloading hydrologic information

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CUAHSI Web Services
Web application Data Portal

• Your application
• Excel, ArcGIS, Matlab
• Fortran, C/C, Visual Basic
• Hydrologic model
• .

• Your operating system
• Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac

Internet
Simple Object Access Protocol
Web Services Library
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NWIS Station Information in HDAS
http//river.sdsc.edu/HDAS
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Observation Site Files
Ameriflux Towers
Automated Surface Observing System
Climate Reference Network
USGS NWIS Stations
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Observation Site Map for US
USGS NWIS
ASOS
Climate Research Network
Ameriflux
others.
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Neuse Basin with all points
NWIS Streamflow and Water Quality
ASOS
Ameriflux
NWIS Groundwater
NARR
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Filtered Site Map
NWIS Streamflow and Water Quality
ASOS
Ameriflux
NARR
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http//public.ornl.gov/ameriflux/
Ameriflux site map
Building each web service requires a site map
and a web services library
Ameriflux towers measure vertical fluxes of
water, heat, CO2
Web services library
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NAWQA
Ameriflux
Storet
LTER
NCDC
NCAR
NWIS
CUAHSI Web Services
Excel
Visual Basic
ArcGIS
C/C
Matlab
Fortran
Access
SAS
Some operational services
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Direct and Indirect Web Services

• Direct web service
• The data agency provides direct querying ability
  into its archives through SOAP or OpenDAP (NCDC)
• Indirect web service
• CUAHSI constructs a web page mimic service,
  housed at SDSC, that programmatically mimics the
  manual use of an agencys web pages (USGS,
  Ameriflux)

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HydroObjects Library

• CUAHSI has developed a HydroObjects Library with
  web service wrappers that know where to access
  each web service and how to interpret its output

User Application (Excel, ArcGIS, ..)
HydroObjects Library with web service wrappers
for NWIS, Ameriflux, NCDC,
Direct or Indirect web services
Web data
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Standards are the Key

• standards
• Industry standards already exists
• SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol
• WSDL Web Service Definition Language
• Hydrologic community must add their own to the
  mix
• HTSS Hydrologic Time Series Service
• HML Hydrologic Markup Language
• software development
• If we adopt SOAP and WSDL standards, we can
  utilize industry support
• Hydrology standards will increase
  interoperability and code reuse
• Request SWAQ to set up an advisory committee for
  to help develop CUAHSI standards for HML

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Utah State Time Series Analyst(developed by Jeff
Horsburgh)
http//water.usu.edu/nwisanalyst/ 
-- operates on CUAHSI web services -- operates on
local data for Neuse basin
http//water.usu.edu/analyzer/
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Transfer of research results

• CUAHSI web services for NWIS were announced at a
  cyberseminar on Friday Oct 28
• On Wednesday Nov 2, Jason Love, from a private
  firm, RESPEC, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
  posted on the EPA Basins list server
  Occasionally one comes across something that is
  worth sharing the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information
  Systems - Web Services Library for NWIS is a
  valuable tool for those of us interested in
  rapidly acquiring and processing data from the
  USGS, e.g., calibrating models and performing
  watershed assessments.
• He provided a tutorial on how to use the services
  from Matlab (which CUAHSI had not developed)
• Technology transfer took less than 1 week!

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Impact of Web Services

• CUAHSI web data services are significantly
  simplifying user access to federal water
  observation data
• This will increase appreciation of the collective
  information content of these data
• Next step is to set the data in context of their
  environment Digital Watershed
• Web services may turn out to be as important or
  even supersede web pages as a data delivery
  mechanism

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HIS Goals

• Hydrologic Data Access System get me the data I
  want quickly and painlessly
• Support for Observatories synthesizing
  hydrologic data for a region
• Advancement of Hydrologic Science data modeling
  and advanced analysis
• Hydrologic Education better data in the
  classroom, basin-focused teaching

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Digital Watershed
How can hydrologists integrate observed and
modeled data from various sources into a single
description of the environment?
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Digital Watershed
Hydrologic Observation Data
Geospatial Data
(GIS)
(Relational database)
Digital Watershed
Remote Sensing Data
Weather and Climate Data
(NetCDF)
(EOS-HDF)
A digital watershed is a synthesis of hydrologic
observation data, geospatial data, remote
sensing data and weather and climate data into a
connected database for a hydrologic region
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Digital WatershedPrototype for the Neuse basin
(See Chapter 8 in the Status Report for details)
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Neuse Atmospheric Water

• Daily precipitation data from NCDC gages
• Nexrad daily rainfall rasters
• Land surface atmosphere fluxes from North
  American Regional Reanalysis of climate

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Neuse Surface Water

• Streamflow, water quality hydrologic
  observational data
• GIS River network, water bodies, watersheds,
  monitoring points
• Land cover, soils,
• MODIS remote sensing (Praveen Kumar and Venkat
  Lakshmi)

MODIS
Terrain and Land Cover
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Neuse Basin Coastal aquifer system
Section line
Beaufort Aquifer
From USGS, Water Resources Data Report of North
Carolina for WY 2002
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Neuse Groundwater
Geovolumes of hydrogeologic units from US
Geological survey (GMS)
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GeoVolume 3D representation of the surface and
subsurface
Geovolume
Geovolume with groundwater model cells
Geovolume of layered soil texture for the Neuse
basin
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Digital Site

• Provides the community with a systematically
  constructed archive of site investigations
• A means of constructive engagement with
  scientists on standardized databases for site
  scale processes
• A library of digital sites of different kinds
  informs digital watershed development

MADE site in Mississippi
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Connecting Arc Hydro and Hydrologic Models
Interfacedata models
GIS
HEC-HMS
Geo Database
Arc Hydro data model
HEC-RAS
HSPF
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Map2Map Workflow Model
DEMO
Flood map as output
Model for flood flow
HMS
Model for flood depth
Nexrad rainfall map as input
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HIS Goals

• Hydrologic Data Access System better access to
  a large volume of high quality hydrologic data
• Support for Observatories synthesizing
  hydrologic data for a region
• Advancement of Hydrologic Science data modeling
  and advanced analysis
• Hydrologic Education better data in the
  classroom, basin-focused teaching

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Towards a Feasible Environmental ObservatoryA
Vision and an Implementation Plan

• Richard P. HooperPresident, CUAHSI

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CUAHSI Community Challenge

• Predict flux of water and chemicals in rivers,
  lakes, aquifers, and estuaries continuously in
  time and space throughout the United States.

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Digital WatershedAn implementation of the
CUAHSI Hydrologic Data Model for a particular
region
Created first for the Neuse basin
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CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System
Multiscale web portal delivering point water
observation data, GIS data, weather and climate
data and remote sensing data for user selected
regions in the United States
National Scale (seamless, coast to coast data
coverage, ArcHydro USA)
1500,000 scale
Multiscale data delivery
Regional Scale (e.g. Neuse basin)
1100,000 scale
Watershed Scale (e.g. Trent watershed )
124,000 scale
Site Scale (experimental site level)
Site scale
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National Hydrologic Information System
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HydroVolumes
Take a watershed and extrude it vertically into
the atmosphere and subsurface A hydrovolume is
a volume in space through which water, energy
and mass flow, are stored internally, and
transformed
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Watershed Hydrovolumes
Hydrovolume
Geovolume is the portion of a hydrovolume that
contains solid earth materials
USGS Gaging stations
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Stream channel Hydrovolumes
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Hydrologic Flux Coupler
Hydrologic Fluxes and Flows
Digital Watershed(Atmospheric, surface and
subsurface water)
We want to do water, mass, energy and water
balances
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Hydrologic Flux Coupler
Define the fluxes and flows associated with each
hydrovolume
Evaporation
Precipitation
Streamflow
See Chapter 9 of Status Report for Details
Groundwater recharge
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Hydrologic Flux Coupler as an ArcGIS Workflow
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Hydrologic Science
It is as important to represent hydrologic
environments precisely with data as it is to
represent hydrologic processes with equations
Physical laws and principles (Mass, momentum,
energy, chemistry)
Hydrologic Process Science (Equations, simulation
models, prediction)
Hydrologic conditions (Fluxes, flows,
concentrations)
Hydrologic Information Science (Observations,
data models, visualization
Hydrologic environment (Dynamic earth)
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Shared Data Models
Environmental Engineering (CLEANER)
Significant progress
Ecology (NEON/LTER)
Geology (GEON)
Hydrology (CUAHSI)
Atmospheric Science (NCAR/Unidata)
Geomorphology (NCED/WSSC)
Limnology, Ocean science, ..
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ArcGIS Geographic data models
About 30 ArcGIS data models for a variety of
disciplines
www.esri.com/datamodels
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Atmospheric science hydrology

• Weather and climate fields are the drivers
  continuous in space and time across the nation
• Local watersheds are the reactors each behaving
  according to its location and characteristics

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GeoTemporal Reference Frame

• A defined geospatial coordinate system for
  (x,y,z)
• A defined time coordinate system (UTC, Eastern
  Standard Time, .)
• A set of variables, V
• Data values v(x,y,z,t)

Time, t
v data values
Space (x,y,z)
Data Cube
Variables, V
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Continuous Space-Time Model NetCDF (Unidata)
Time, T
Coordinate dimensions X
D
Space, L
Variable dimensions Y
Variables, V
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Discrete Space-Time Data ModelArcHydro
Time, TSDateTime
TSValue
Space, FeatureID
Variables, TSTypeID
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Proposed new format GeoNetCDF
Continuous Space (NetCDF)
Discrete Space (GIS)
ArcGIS version 9.2 (in beta release)
accepts netCDF as a native file format
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HIS Goals

• Hydrologic Data Access System better access to
  a large volume of high quality hydrologic data
• Support for Observatories synthesizing
  hydrologic data for a region
• Advancement of Hydrologic Science data modeling
  and advanced analysis
• Hydrologic Education better data in the
  classroom, basin-focused teaching

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Basin-oriented teaching

• Focus class on interpretation of a single river
  basin
• Interdisciplinary teaching
• Water balances for each phase of hydrologic cycle
• Use Unidata Integrated Data Viewer to access
  weather info

http//www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/gradhydro20
05/gradhydro2005.htm
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Conclusions

• HIS a geographically distributed system of
  web-connected data and functions
• Hydrologic Data Access System is a significant
  technological innovation
• Emerging understanding of digital watershed
  structure and functions
• Beginnings of hydrologic information science and
  shared data models with neighbouring sciences