Open Source Cyberinfrastructure to Simplify the Development and Deployment of Environmental Modelling Web Applications

Welcome to the age of the Water Data Deluge – certainly the most amazing period in human history to be a water resources scientist or environmental engineer! It is a peculiar and amazing time characterized by the creation, on a daily basis, of massive quantities of data and information that dwarf the world’s complete water data catalog of only a decade or two earlier. It is a time when an individual scientist with the most basic and inexpensive hardware and software can build a data collection network that can generate a veritable flood of information about the environment. So, what do we do with all of this data? How do we store, retrieve, visualize, document, cite, and make sense of environmental observations that quickly grow from the hundreds of thousands of values to the millions of values? What do we do when these counts escalate into to the billions or trillions of observations? Certainly a new generation of cyberinfrastructure is needed to help manage and interpret such data. In the United States, the National Science Foundation has funded a series of projects and programs centered on improved scientific cyberinfrastructure with the goal of creating a large ecosystem of tools and technologies that can help address these problems. This presentation will examine two such projects presently underway at Brigham Young University, including HydroShare: a system for community collaboration and data sharing in the cloud; and Tethys Platform: open source tools for rapid development and deployment of water and environmental web apps.