Integrating hydrological modelling, data assimilation and cloud computing for real-time management of water resources

Kurtz, Wolfgang; Lapin, Andrei; Schilling, Oliver S.; Tang, Qi; Schiller, Eryk; Braun, Torsten; Hunkeler, Daniel; Vereecken, Harry; Sudicky, Edward A.; Kropf, Peter; Franssen, Harrie‐Jan Hendricks; Brunner, Philip

doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.03.011

Cited by 67 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(71 reference statements)

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“…Most relevant data required for winter hydrological simulations with HGS are readily available, and there is no extra effort involved in setting up an integrated SW‐GW model for winter‐influenced catchments. With the efficient implementation of winter hydrological processes into HGS, intra‐ as well as inter‐annual simulations of small catchments under the influence of winter can be undertaken on normal desktop machines, and more complex simulations, for example of large catchments under climate change scenarios, can be simulated on computational cloud infrastructure (Kurtz et al ; Cochand et al ). The representation of winter hydrological processes in HGS relies on some simplifying assumptions, such as uniform thermal properties and negligible heat transfer by convection in the subsurface.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Investigations on the interactions between groundwater, surface water, and vegetation (e.g., Ala‐Aho et al [], Schilling et al [], Schomburg et al []), on the development of unsaturated zones between rivers and aquifers in heterogeneous systems (e.g., Irvine et al [], Schilling et al [], Tang et al []), or on contaminant transport and tile drainage in agricultural contexts (e.g., Bonton et al [], De Schepper et al []) are just some recent examples for which HGS was used. HGS has recently been coupled to the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model for the integrated simulation of atmosphere, surface, and subsurface interactions (Davison et al ), to particle tracking and flow tracking tools (Partington et al ; Partington et al ; Chow et al ; Schilling et al ), and to the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) data assimilation tool (Kurtz et al ; Tang et al ; Tang et al ).…”

Section: Winter Hydrological Processes In Hgsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Modified tilted V‐catchment model, after Kurtz et al (). 2 × 4 groundwater wells are installed towards the outlet of the catchment (indicated by the black columns).…”

Section: Model Verificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The modified tilted‐V catchment with alluvial drinking water production is a typical setup in mountainous and peri‐alpine catchments, where winter processes play a key role (Kurtz et al ; Schilling et al ). If winter processes are not taken into account when managing groundwater pumping stations in such systems, during the winter season groundwater abstraction may exceed sustainable amounts because recharge is strongly reduced by the retention of precipitation as snow.…”

Section: Model Verificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Integrated Surface and Subsurface Hydrological Modeling with Snowmelt and Pore Water Freeze–Thaw

Schilling¹,

Park²,

Therrien

et al. 2018

Groundwater

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For the simulation of winter hydrological processes a gap in the availability of flow models existed: one either had the choice between (1) physically‐based and fully‐integrated, but computationally very intensive, or (2) simplified and compartamentalized, but computationally less expensive, simulators. To bridge this gap, we here present the integration of a computationally efficient representation of winter hydrological processes (snowfall, snow accumulation, snowmelt, pore water freeze–thaw) in a fully‐integrated surface water‐groundwater flow model. This allows the efficient simulation of catchment‐scale hydrological processes in locations significantly influenced by winter processes. Snow accumulation and snowmelt are based on the degree‐day method and pore water freeze–thaw is calculated with a vertical heat conduction approach. This representation of winter hydrological processes is integrated into the fully‐coupled surface water‐groundwater flow model HydroGeoSphere. A benchmark for pore water freeze–thaw as well as two illustrative examples are provided.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Winter Hydrological Processes In Hgsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Modified tilted V‐catchment model, after Kurtz et al (). 2 × 4 groundwater wells are installed towards the outlet of the catchment (indicated by the black columns).…”

Section: Model Verificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Model Verificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Integrated Surface and Subsurface Hydrological Modeling with Snowmelt and Pore Water Freeze–Thaw

Schilling¹,

Park²,

Therrien

et al. 2018

Groundwater

Self Cite

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“…This allows users to access and execute the model without an increase in responding time. Kurtz et al (2017) presented a stochastic cloudbased fully-operational architecture for a real-time prediction and management system related to the groundwater management. This proposed system allows for data assimilation and is coupled with a physically based hydrologic model, HydroGeoSphere, in a cloud environment to use the generated prediction for the groundwater management.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyberinfrastructure to Support Flood Modeling from Catchment to Regional Scales

Morsy

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Flooding events are projected to increase in frequency and intensity in coming years due to climate change. New tools and approaches are needed to assist decision makers in better understanding and addressing societal impacts due to flooding and how to mitigate these impacts.This research addressed three challenges related to flooding impacts: (i) better understanding how distributed stormwater infrastructure can mitigate flooding in urban catchments, (ii) designing and building spatially-detailed, real-time flood warning systems for emergency management purposes, and (iii) designing and building cyberinfrastructure to support reuse and transparency in both flood modeling and hydrologic modeling more broadly. The goal of this research was to address these challenges by conducting three studies. The second study explored building an automated cloud-based system for forecasting flooded roadway and bridge locations at a regional-scale. Because the study area has very low topographic relief, a two-dimensional (2D), computationally-expensive hydrodynamic model is required. This study demonstrated the ability of using instances in a public cloud with powerful graphical processing units (GPUs) to run a large (average of 4 million nodes) 2D hydrodynamic model in a time frame relevant to real-time emergency management applications. The steps required to build this system were (i) creating an automated workflow for obtaining and processing ii forecast rainfall data, (ii) running the 2D model in the cloud, (iii) using geospatial analysis tools to identify flooded bridges, and (iv) presenting the results online for decision makers. The system automates forecast data access and pre-processing, execution of a high-resolution 2D hydrodynamic model, and map-based visualization of model outputs using Amazon Web Services (AWS).The third study advanced approaches for sharing hydrologic models, such as the models created in this dissertation, through community supported cyberinfrastructure. Sharing models is important for scientific reproducibility, reuse, and fidelity. In this study, the first task was to design a metadata framework for hydrologic models that is flexible and applicable across the wide variety of models used by hydrologists. Then the study demonstrated the utility of this framework for sharing, publishing, and reusing models through an implementation within the HydroShare cyberinfrastructure system.In the first study, the results suggest that rain gardens with 30 cm berm heights and a total area equal to 20% of the impervious surfaces within the watershed should provide sufficient storage to mitigate flooding for rain events up to and including a 10 year return period storm event.The results also suggest approximately 15%, 27%, and 38% of the runoff generated from impervious surfaces should be diverted to the rain gardens to mitigate flooding from 2, 5, and 10 year return period storm events, respectively. Given prior work on the adoption of LID approaches for other watersheds, rain gardens could effectivel...

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Advances in understanding river‐groundwater interactions

Brunner

Therrien

Renard

et al. 2017

Reviews of Geophysics

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191

126

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River‐groundwater interactions are at the core of a wide range of major contemporary challenges, including the provision of high‐quality drinking water in sufficient quantities, the loss of biodiversity in river ecosystems, or the management of environmental flow regimes. This paper reviews state of the art approaches in characterizing and modeling river and groundwater interactions. Our review covers a wide range of approaches, including remote sensing to characterize the streambed, emerging methods to measure exchange fluxes between rivers and groundwater, and developments in several disciplines relevant to the river‐groundwater interface. We discuss approaches for automated calibration, and real‐time modeling, which improve the simulation and understanding of river‐groundwater interactions. Although the integration of these various approaches and disciplines is advancing, major research gaps remain to be filled to allow more complete and quantitative integration across disciplines. New possibilities for generating realistic distributions of streambed properties, in combination with more data and novel data types, have great potential to improve our understanding and predictive capabilities for river‐groundwater systems, especially in combination with the integrated simulation of the river and groundwater flow as well as calibration methods. Understanding the implications of different data types and resolution, the development of highly instrumented field sites, ongoing model development, and the ultimate integration of models and data are important future research areas. These developments are required to expand our current understanding to do justice to the complexity of natural systems.

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Integrating hydrological modelling, data assimilation and cloud computing for real-time management of water resources

Cited by 67 publications

References 55 publications

Integrated Surface and Subsurface Hydrological Modeling with Snowmelt and Pore Water Freeze–Thaw

Integrated Surface and Subsurface Hydrological Modeling with Snowmelt and Pore Water Freeze–Thaw

Cyberinfrastructure to Support Flood Modeling from Catchment to Regional Scales

Advances in understanding river‐groundwater interactions

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