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.
The purpose of this project is to provide better access to hydrologic data to support advancement of hydrologic science in the nation’s universities. Students, researchers and faculty are conscious that there are many sources of data available from different sources and in various formats. They find this information difficult to access in a systematic and readily usable way. One class of water information is particularly important – the time series of measurements of precipitation, streamflow, groundwater level, evaporation, soil moisture, water quality, and other variables that describe the quantity and quality of water, measured at point locations such as gages and sampling sites. In this project, a "services-oriented architecture" was developed for time series of water data that links providers of the data with users and includes a national catalog of water data services from more than a hundred data sources, including the major federal water data sources. Central to this architecture is a standard language for conveying water time series through the internet called WaterML that was defined for the first time in this project. WaterML is analogous for water to the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that is the foundation of communication on the broader internet. The US Geological Survey adopted WaterML and now uses it to publish its water resources time series data, both for real-time and historical data. This is the largest body of water information in the United States. In collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium and the World Meteorological Organization, this project initiated a Hydrology Domain Working Group in 2009 that has since become the default mechanism for establishing international standards for water data transmission through the internet. A new version of the language, called WaterML2, reconciled with other international standards, was adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2012 and endorsed in 2013 by the Executive Office of the President of the United States as part of the national strategy for civil earth observation. WaterML2 is the first and only international standard for water data sharing and is being adopted in other countries besides the United States, thus creating the basis for a global water information system analogous to that already existing for global sharing of weather information. Having a common language for water time series will improve the nation’s capacity to connect national flood forecasting with local emergency response and thus to provide more timely flood warning to citizens threatened with impending floods. It will also help to synthesize the many sources of water information needed to obtain deeper insight into the causes of drought. It will help to combine information on streamflow and water quality to enable better estimates of water pollution in the nation’s streams and rivers. The National Science Foundation has a goal of achieving transformative research, as being research that involves ideas that radically change our understanding of an important existing scientific or engineering concept and lead to the creation of a new paradigm. This project has achieved that goal by creating the first widely accepted language for global communication of water information.
