Developing a VisTrails Platform for Modeling Streamflow Hydrology and Projecting Climate Change Effects on Streamflow

Hydrologic models are used throughout the world to forecast and simulate streamflow, inform water management, municipal planning, and ecosystem conservation, and investigate potential effects of climate and land-use change on hydrology. The USGS Modeling of Watershed Systems (MoWS) group is currently developing the infrastructure for a National Hydrologic Model (NHM) to support coordinated, comprehensive, and consistent hydrologic model development and application. The NHM will provide internally consistent estimates of total water availability, water sources, and streamflow timing, and measures of uncertainty around these estimates, for the entire United States. VisTrails, a scientific workflow and provenance management system (www.vistrails.org), could be used to facilitate consistent, organized, reproducible data management, analysis, and visualization for the NHM. A VisTrails system for the USGS Monthly Water Balance model (MWB) and/or the USGS Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) would be widely used in the NHM effort as well as by numerous agencies and researchers for individual model applications. Project Researchers will work with North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) staff to develop a VisTrails system for MWB, as a first step in developing a more complex VisTrails system for PRMS. The resulting VisTrails system for MWB will facilitate consistent, organized, and reproducible model calibration and simulations for monthly streamflow projections by research hydrologists and managers nationwide.

project_id
520bc526e4b0d6ca4606ecd3
Project_type
Project
CSC Name
North Central CASC
usgs summary

Hydrologic models are used throughout the world to forecast and simulate streamflow, inform water management, municipal planning, and ecosystem conservation, and investigate potential effects of climate and land-use change on hydrology. The USGS Mode ...

csc id
4f83509de4b0e84f60868124
csc status
Completed
test field
2013-08-14T11:57:58.102-06:00