Cyberinfrastructure and Web Apps for Managing and Disseminating the National Water Model

Abstract

Hydrologic modeling can be used to provide warnings before, and to support operations during and after floods. Recent technological advances have increased our ability to create hydrologic models over large areas. In the United States (U.S.), a new National Water Model (NWM) that generates hydrologic variables at a national scale was released in August 2016. This model represents a substantial step forward in our ability to predict hydrologic events in a consistent fashion across the entire U.S. Nevertheless, for these hydrologic results to be effectively communicated, they need to be put in context and be presented in a way that is straightforward and facilitates management‐related decisions. The large amounts of data produced by the NWM present one of the major challenges to fulfill this goal. We created a cyberinfrastructure to store NWM results, “accessibility” web applications to retrieve NWM results, and a REST API to access NWM results programmatically. To demonstrate the utility of this cyberinfrastructure, we created additional web apps that illustrate how to use our REST API and communicate hydrologic forecasts with the aid of dynamic flood maps. This work offers a starting point for the development of a more comprehensive toolset to validate the NWM while also improving the ability to access and visualize NWM forecasts, and develop additional national‐scale‐derived products such as flood maps.

Disruptive Technologies for Improving Water Security in Large River Basins

“…New technologies are enabling improvements in information interoperability [63] and institutional infrastructure that can be developed at reasonable cost (e.g., ecosystems of computers, tablets, and smartphones and related Apps; shared audio/videoconferencing, shared communication, and touchscreen access resources; dynamic physical-computer modeling approaches [e.g., [69]). These can be co-located in clusters such as water centers that allow for co-location of representatives from related organizations that need to work together (e.g., the National Water Center in the United States) to develop and use shared products (e.g., the National Water Model [70]). These approaches could be adopted in many countries and transboundary basins where shared personnel and tools could 'disrupt' traditional 'siloed' approaches.…”

Featured Collection Introduction: National Water Model

“…The paper by Souffront Alcantara et al. () presents the development of cyberinfrastructure and web apps designed to manage and disseminate NWM results. The web apps were designed using the Tethys platform, a framework for developing water resources web applications, which student participants have used in every Summer Institute.…”

Enabling Stakeholder Decision-Making With Earth Observation and Modeling Data Using Tethys Platform

“…The remainder of this paper explores the use of a relatively new big data visualization web application development toolkit called Tethys Platform and its adoption and use within the SERVIR community. Tethys Platform was developed to help lower barriers to web application development in water and environmental modeling (Swain et al, 2016) and has been used successfully as an open source data portal in several applications (Ames et al, 2018;Jackson et al, 2018;Markert et al, 2018;Souffront Alcantara et al, 2018).…”