Reproducible Earth-surface modeling with Landlab on HydroShare

This is a poster developed for the EarthCube All Hands Meeting: https://www.earthcube.org/2017-all-hands-meeting; Seattle WA, USA June 7-9, 2017 “Making Connections & Moving Forward”.

Authors:
Christina J. Bandaragoda1, Anthony Castronova2, Jimmy Phuong3, Ronda Strauch1, Erkan Istanbulluoglu1, Sai Siddhartha Nudurupati1, David Tarboton4, Dandong Yin5, Shaowen Wang5, Katherine Barnhart6, Gregory E. Tucker6, Eric W. H. Hutton7, Daniel E. J. Hobley8, Nicole M. Gasparini9, Jordan M. Adams9

Affiliations:
1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, USA; 2 Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), USA;
3 Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington, Seattle, USA; 4 Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Utah State University, Logan, USA; 5 National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne, USA;
6 Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA; 7 Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS), University of Colorado, Boulder, USA; 8 Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK; 9 Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA.

Abstract:
The ability to test hypotheses about surface processes coupled to both subsurface and atmospheric regimes is invaluable to research in the Earth and planetary sciences; ,to swiftly develop experiments using community resources is extraordinary. However, creating a new model can demand a large investment of time, expert software skills, and can be constrained to adapting existing models with limited flexibility to address new questions. Advancing the state of knowledge includes not only experimentation and publication, but also communication and distribution of large, and complex models and datasets. Landlab is an open-source modeling toolkit for building, coupling, and exploring two-dimensional numerical models. HydroShare is an online collaborative environment for sharing data and models. Together, Landlab on HydroShare accelerates the development of new process models by providing (1) a set of tools for regular and irregular grid structures, data manipulation and visualization to make it faster and easier to develop new physical process components, (2) a suite of modular and interoperable process components that can be combined to create an integrated model; (3) cyber infrastructure that provides collaboration functions with multiple levels of sharing and privacy settings, Creative Commons license options, and DOI publishing, and 4) cloud access with high-speed processing from the CyberGIS HydroShare JupyterHub server at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. New users can run models from a web browser, while advanced users can execute and develop models from command line terminals. Landlab on HydroShare supports the modeling continuum from fully developed modelling applications, prototyping new science tools, hands on research demonstrations, and classroom applications. The HydroShare-Landlab building block in EarthCube is a model of technology collaboration and tool exchange in the geoscience modeling community.