Water Data and Software Services to Support Discovery, Reproducibility, and Collaboration in the Water-Resources Domain and Beyond

 in Responsible Data Science / Success Stories / Urban to Rural Communities

Guest post by Emily Clark, Project Manager, CUAHSI

The mission of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) is to enable interdisciplinary collaboration in the water sciences, provide critical cyberinfrastructure, and promote water science education at all levels. CUAHSI’s services can be especially useful in supporting the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub’s Focus Areas of water-resources Education and Data Literacy, water issues in the Urban to Rural Communities continuum, and Responsible Data Science through the transparency and reproducibility offered by CUAHSI’s services.

CUAHSI’s data services support all aspects of the data management life cycle and enable reproducible science.

CUAHSI’s services provide resources for managing and disseminating data. This includes accessing time-series data from large data providers through the Hydrologic Information System (HIS) and time-series data uploaded by individual users, including volunteer monitoring organizations. CUAHSI’s HIS provides access to over 300 billion unique observations, representing nearly 500 data types from more than 100 organizations and 1.7 million locations all over the world.  

CUAHSI’s HydroShare provides a wide range of capabilities. Users can utilize HydroShare to store data and manage who can discover, view, and download the data.  HydroShare provides online collaboration tools and allows users to publish data and workflows with a DOI, thereby improving reproducibility, accessibility, and transparency in the water sciences.  Various apps are accessible through HydroShare to facilitate data analysis, including CUAHSI’s own JupyterHub and MATLAB online. 

All of the code supporting CUAHSI’s data services are open source and freely available to everyone.  For example, an instance of HydroShare has been implemented for the Mekong River Basin by the U.S. State Department to support data transparency in the Mekong Basin where water conflicts remain a challenge.

Learn more about finding, archiving, and publishing data with HydroShare or CUAHSI’s Hydrologic Information System at https://www.cuahsi.org/community/water-data-portals. 

CUAHSI’s Compute Services enable education and research in the cloud.

In addition to tools that enable data discovery and publication, CUAHSI develops and maintains cloud software to interoperate with CUAHSI’s data repositories to provide analysis, publication, and replication of scientific models and workflows.

CUAHSI JupyterHub

CUAHSI JupyterHub is a cloud service that allows users to execute scientific code and explore, modify, and interact with data inside a remote execution environment using Python and/or R programming languages. It is closely integrated with the CUAHSI HydroShare data repository through an API, making it easy to leverage community datasets, collaborate, and disseminate research workflows that are published in HydroShare. 

CUAHSI JupyterHub was recently leveraged for a Utah State University Physical Hydrology learning module to derive hydrologic information from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). CUAHSI JupyterHub has also been featured in the Waterhackweek workshop at University of Washington, which provides instruction on using online computing environments to analyze data in the cloud. 

MATLAB Online

CUAHSI has partnered with MathWorks to offer a community modeling platform using MATLAB software. MATLAB and more than 100 add-ons are used by 5,000 universities worldwide and across industries for a range of applications from climate analysis to medical device development. Together, CUAHSI and MathWorks aim to support practical quantitative thinking and exploration in water science research and education. CUAHSI MATLAB Online is connected to the HydroShare repository to provide access to data and code and leverages the MATLAB compute environment for analyzing data and reproducing research findings. This capability provides a convenient and freely accessible mechanism for data discovery, collaboration, and reproducibility, and is relevant to a wide range of water-resources professionals.

Get Started with CUAHSI’s Data and Compute Services

CUAHSI’s data and compute services provide many opportunities for managing and accessing data, facilitating collaboration, and enabling reproducible science, research, and workflows. We have provided a few suggested starting points below. We encourage you to reach out to CUAHSI staff at help@cuahsi.org to further discuss how CUAHSI’s Data and Compute services can meet your needs. 

  • View this webinar to learn more about HydroShare and CUAHSI’s data sharing tools.
  • This quick start guide demonstrates how users can store their own data in HydroShare in 7 easy steps. 
  • This webinar provides an overview of Jupyter Notebook Workflows using Hydroshare. 
  • Apply for a Hydroinformatics Innovation Fellowship Award to create a hydroinformatics product, such as an app that can integrate with CUAHSI’s data and compute tools, technical publication, or STEM curriculum.

In addition to data and compute tools and services, CUAHSI supports the development of training workshops or cyberseminars, with emphasis on those that can be integrated with CUAHSI tools and services. Learn more about how you can host a training to share your knowledge on a specific method, tool, or technique.

To learn more about this project, you can reach out to eclark@cuahsi.org