HydroShare: A Platform for Collaborative Data and Model Sharing in Hydrology

Researchers across the country and around the world expend tremendous resources to gather and analyze vast stores of data and populate models to better understand the process they are studying. Each of those researchers has limited money, time, computational capacity, data storage, and ability to put that data to productive use. What if they could combine their efforts to make collaboration easier? What if those collected data sets and processed model outputs could be used collaboratively to help advance knowledge beyond their original purpose? It is these questions that are motivating the movement towards open data, better data management and collaboration and sharing in the use of data and models. In short, researchers are relying more on teamwork to tackle the big problems of the day. This presentation will describe the HydroShare web based hydrologic information system operated by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI) that is available for use as a service to the hydrology community. HydroShare includes a repository for users to share and publish data and models in a variety of formats, and to make this information available in a citable, shareable, and discoverable manner. HydroShare also includes tools (web apps) that can act on content in HydroShare, providing users with a gateway to high performance computing and computing in the cloud. HydroShare has components that support: (1) resource storage, (2) resource exploration, and (3) web apps for actions on resources. The HydroShare data discovery, sharing and publishing functions as well as HydroShare web apps provide the capability to analyze data and execute models completely in the cloud, overcoming desktop platform limitations. We will discuss how these developments can be used to support collaborative research and modeling in Hydrology, where being web based is of value as collaborators can all have access to the same functionality regardless of their computer. We will illustrate the use of HydroShare for collecting and making accessible to the community data from the US National Water Model and 2017 Atlantic Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria that had significant impacts on parts of the US and islands in the Caribbean. HydroShare is being used to assemble, document and archive hydrologic data from these events to support research to improve our understanding of and capability to prepare for and respond to such extreme events in the future.

Presentation at 2018 AWRA Spring Specialty Conference: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Water Resources X, Orlando, Florida, April 23-25, http://awra.org/meetings/Orlando2018/.