GeoInformatics: Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information Systems

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal advances integrative hydrologic science through the development of a hydrologic information system that can be implemented at universities throughout the United States. It involves collaboration between hydrologic scientists represented through the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI), and computer scientists from the San Diego Supercomputer Center. This proposal supports a larger strategy at NSF to develop cyberinfrastructure for the environmental and earth sciences. The CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) is a geographically distributed network of hydrologic data sources and functions that are integrated using web services so that they function as a connected whole. We call this information stream WaterOneFlow, since it integrates the national water data archives with locally published hydrologic data, and makes them directly accessible to hydrologic scientists, almost as if the data were located on a local disk drive. WaterOneFlow is not limited to data scientific workflow systems are used to modularize hydrologic models, enabling them to be published as web services, included in processing sequences, and operated remotely as information sources. This combination of scientific workflows and web services can revolutionize hydrologic modeling. Thus, a distributed network of hydrologic data and models are connected across the internet and collectively support the advancement of hydrologic science and education. The intellectual merit of this project is that it harnesses information technology to support hydrologic science by building an information model that has a coherent intellectual structure and synthesizes data from many disciplines and data sources. This information model forms the basis for a distributed service-oriented hydrologic information system that has been prototyped in HIS Phase 1 and will be developed in this renewal project, HIS Phase 2. This system enables the tracing of water movement and transport of constituents vertically between the atmosphere, surface water and groundwater, and horizontally through the landscape from watersheds and aquifers to streams, rivers, estuaries and bays. It integrates data across scales of space and time. HIS will enable the testing of hypotheses about the interfaces between hydrologic processes in a manner and scale that is rarely attempted now, and based on more information than has been previously possible. CUAHSI has identified this as a central challenge facing hydrologic science. This effort also represents an intellectual investment into the merging of hydrologic science domain expertise with cyberinfrastructure technology knowledge. The broader impacts of this project include its networking of hydrologic scientists at many universities who will jointly be contributing and receiving hydrologic information. The CUAHSI hydrologic information system and its accompanying datasets will be developed in the public domain and available to the professional hydrology community, and to educators at all levels. The hydrologic information system developed in this project is significant for hydrologic science and also in showing how cyberinfrastructure is developed for earth and environmental sciences. Related NSF Environmental Observatory initiatives including OOI/ORION, NEON, LTER, and CLEANER are closely following the cyberinfrastructure developments of the CUAHSI HIS group. Moreover, the goal of uniting the nation's water information has wide value for water management, engineering and planning, and the CUAHSI HIS is a means of helping the data delivery services of the Federal water agencies live up to their full potential. The project also includes a partnership with the Navajo Nation water resources program to help integrate and publish their water information. In the computer industry, CUAHSI HIS has received attention as an example of building distributed information systems that integrate scientific principles for helping better manage our nation.