Studies of water in the environment are fundamental in many research disciplines. The importance of understanding water related issues, including quantity and quality at local, national, and global sales, has grown significantly in the past decade. There is a strong need for a community-oriented cyberinfrastructure for researchers and educators to explore hydrological processes using observed data and computationally intensive modeling tools. For example, the SWAT model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) has been widely used to study the impact of land management practices in large, complex watersheds. The model is data intensive and requires a lot of computation power, for example, to calibrate for a large watershed. However, researchers typically run this model as a stand-alone desktop application, which not only limits the size of the problems that researchers can tackle due to resource constraints, but is not conducive to collaboration. No service exists that allows modelers to share their model inputs which are time-consuming to set up. This presentation will describe the development of a hydrological collaboration tool and workflow, SWATShare, in the WaterHUB (http://water-hub.org). SWATShare not only supports end-to-end SWAT simulations using the XSEDE HPC resources but also allows easy data/model publishing, discovery and sharing within the community. The SWATShare tool builds on top of the HUBzero web platform and is implemented using an extensible layered system architecture including a FLEX based GIS user interface, a set of geospatial data and modeling services, and HPC resources at the backend. It extends the core HUBzero software stacks to bring large scale geospatial data and modeling capabilities into HUBzero. We will also discuss our experience of using SWATShare in a civil engineering graduate-level class taught at Purdue in fall 2011 as well as future work. Our experience developing the WaterHUB will also contribute to a recently awarded NSF SI2 project.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Venkatesh Merwade (2012), "WaterHUB: Enabling hydrological exploration, modeling and collaboration," https://help.hubzero.org/resources/836.

  BibTex | EndNote