| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 12, 2018 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 12, 2018 |
| Award Number: | 1835569 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Varun Chandola
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | October 1, 2018 |
| End Date: | September 30, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $339,985.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $339,985.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1000 OLD MAIN HL LOGAN UT US 84322-1000 (435)797-1226 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
UT US 84322-4110 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Software Institutes |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
This award supports the design and implementation of a software framework to simulate the movement of water at various scales. Understanding the movement and availability of water locally and across the country is of paramount importance to economic productivity and human health of our nation. Hydrologic scientists, are actively tackling these challenges using increasingly complex computational methods. However, modeling advances have not been easily translated to the broader community of scientists and professionals due to technical barriers to entry. This software platform draws from computer models and employs supercomputers capable of analyzing big data to provide unprecedented simulations of water movement over the continental US. Combining hydrologists and computer scientists the team behind the project envision a broad community of users who will have multiple ways to interact with the software framework. For the hydrologic scientist who is interested in generating their own scenarios the framework will facilitate direct interaction with the hydrologic models and the ability to generate simulations on the fly. Conversely, the framework will also provide a set of static output and a range of tools for a broader set of users who would like to evaluate hydrologic projections locally or extract model data for use in other analyses.
Continental scale simulation of water flow through rivers, streams and groundwater is an identified grand challenge in hydrology. Decades of model development, combined with advances in solver technology and software engineering have enabled large-scale, high-resolution simulations of the hydrologic cycle over the US, yet substantial technical and communication challenges remain. With support from this award, an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and hydrologists is developing a framework to leverage advances in computer science transforming simulation and data-driven discovery in the Hydrologic Sciences and beyond. This project is advancing the science behind these national scale hydrologic models, accelerating their capabilities and building novel interfaces for user interaction. The framework brings computational and domain science (hydrology) communities together to move more quickly from tools (models, big data, high-performance computing) to discoveries. It facilitates decadal, national scale simulations, which are an unprecedented resource for both the hydrologic community and the much broader community of people working in water dependent systems (e.g., biological system, energy and food production). These simulations will enable the community to address scientific questions about water availability and dynamics from the watershed to the national scale. Additionally, this framework is designed to facilitate multiple modes of interaction and engage a broad spectrum of users outside the hydrologic community. We will provide easy-to-access pre-processed datasets that can be visualized and plotted using built-in tools that will require no computer science or hydrology background. Recognizing that most hydrology training does not generally include High Performance Computing and data analytics or software engineering, this framework will provide a gateway for computationally enhanced hydrologic discovery. Additionally, for educators we will develop packaged videos and educational modules on different hydrologic systems geared towards K-12 classrooms.
This award by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Cross-Cutting Activities Program of the Division of Earth Sciences within the NSF Directorate for Geosciences.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The goal of this project was to create an integrated software framework for continental scale hydrologic simulation and data analysis built with multi-scale configurable components. This was a collaborative project spanning multiple institutions. The contribution from the Utah State University collaborative component reported here was the connection to and interoperability with HydroShare. HydroShare is a web-based repository and hydrologic information system for users to share, collaborate around, and publish data, models, workflows, and applications associated with water related research. HydroShare was developed with support from prior NSF awards and is now operated by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI), on behalf of the hydrology research community.
Continental scale simulation of water flow through rivers, streams and groundwater is an identified grand challenge in hydrology. Decades of model development, combined with advances in solver technology and software engineering have enabled large-scale, high-resolution simulations of the hydrologic cycle over the US, yet substantial technical and communication challenges remain and it is difficult for researchers such as graduate students with limited high-performance computing and computer science expertise to set up and apply these models. Over the project duration our team has focused on two major activities: (1) developing the hydrologic models and simulations over the Continental US domain; and (2) developing workflows to help others interact with these datasets and simulations. The component of the collaborative project reported here has contributed to the second component. We designed a modeling framework that integrates existing community cyberinfrastructure tools to support U.S. National Water Model (NWM) simulations for research scale subdomains (less than about 1000 km2) located within the U.S. We used the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) HydroShare data and model repository as a gateway to a JupyterHub computing platform hosted in the NSF ACCESS Jetstream computing infrastructure. This framework allows a user to specify the subset domain and time period over which they want to run a research instance of the NWM, generate model input files, execute the model on high performance computing infrastructure and analyze the results, comparing to what is available from the U.S. Office of Water Prediction NWM runs, as a starting point for research to improve the NWM. This integrated approach allows a broader range of users to conduct NWM based research. The modeling framework workflow is documented using Jupyter Notebooks that may be executed by any user on the supported platform. This makes it easy to use and enhances transparency and reproducibility.
As part of this work, and as a use case that demonstrated application of the framework developed, we compared evapotranspiration simulated by the National Water Model Retrospective Analysis with Remotely Sensed Estimates from OpenET, a satellite-driven data product offering actual ET information at 30-m resolution. Results indicated that the NWM tends to underpredict ET fluxes when compared against the different OpenET component models used in this study. OpenET showed a bias in comparison with water balance assessments of ET in two natural sub-watersheds characterized by evergreen forest. These finding suggest opportunities for improving the ET process representations within the NWM.
HydroShare has been widely adopted in the hydrology research community and by having the capability developed here operational on JupyterHub computing environments linked to HydroShare it has become easier for researchers without specialized high-performance computing expertise to collaborate and participate in large scale hydrologic modeling research. Access to this research capability by a broader set of users enables the potential for more rapidly addressing the grand challenge associated with improving continental scale hydrologic simulation.
Last Modified: 01/27/2024
Modified by: David G Tarboton
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