Background

Large scale surface water and groundwater models are essential tools for improving our understanding of the dynamic interaction between the water cycle and human activity. This is especially true when investigating human impacts, extreme hydrologic events, and future water resource availability. Results from these models advance hydrologic science and inform neighboring research disciplines. As a result, community intellectual contributions to the physics, configuration, and validation of continental-scale models are essential to improving the usefulness and adoption of these models within the academic community. Due to the computational scale of these models, they often require specialized computing hardware and vast amounts of domain and forcing data, making it difficult for the broader water science community to directly engage in development and research efforts. CUAHSI has recognized this challenge and is collaborating with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Colorado School of Mines, and other entities involved with continental-scale hydrology modeling to improve the accessibility of model domain input data.

Purpose

The purpose of this application is to introduce a collaborative effort for preparing, publishing, and sharing subsets of the NOAA National Water Model and ParFlow-CONUS input data at watershed scales. Our hope is that these efforts will lower the barrier of entry for using and applying these models, as well as engage a variety of scientists and educators from a diverse spectrum of expertise. With a combination of modern cyberinfrastructure techniques and state-of-the-science modeling tools, researchers will have access to subsets of National Water Model and ParFlow-CONUS information that would otherwise require extensive computational resources. This work provides the foundation onto which similar efforts can be applied to new versions of these models and other large-scale codes and input data. We anticipate the CUAHSI Domain Subsetter will eventually become integrated into the larger HydroFrame infrastructure.

Contributors

Currently, this work is a collaborative effort between CUAHSI, Colorado School of Mines, NCAR, and the NWS/OWP. If you are interested in collaborating with us on a similar project, please contact Tony Castronova or Danielle Tijerina .