Design and Implementation of Cyberinfrastructure to Support a Cloud-Based, Community Hydrologic Modeling Ecosystem

Hydrologic research is tackling more and more complex questions, requiring researchers to collaborate in teams to build complex, integrated model simulations. Accordingly, the use of cyberinfrastructure is increasing due to the need for collaborative modeling, high throughput computing, and reproducibility and usability. However, the design and implementation in cyberinfrastructure to support community hydrologic modeling are still challenging because much functionality, such as the user interface for modeling, online data sharing, and different model execution environments are necessary to support modeling cyberinfrastructure. In this research, we present a collaborative, cloud-based modeling system built on the Structure for Unifying Multiple Modeling Alternatives (SUMMA) hydrologic model as an example paradigm for the design and implementation of cyberinfrastructure. The general paradigm consists of three main components: (i) a Python-based model Application Programming Interface (API) for interacting with hydrologic models, (ii) an online repository for storing model input and output files for different simulation runs, and (iii) a public JupyterHub environment for creating and running model simulations that leverages both the Python API and the online data repository. In this instance, we first created pySUMMA as an example API for interacting with the SUMMA modeling framework. Second, we used HydroShare as an online repository for sharing data and models. Finally, we used a JupyterHub instance tailored for running SUMMA model simulations and hosted by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI). Together, these three components serve as a general example of a cloud-based modeling environment that can be used along with other models and modeling frameworks, in addition to SUMMA, to foster a community supported cyberinfrastructure for collaborative hydrologic modeling.