EGU22-7274
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-7274
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The eWaterCycle platform for open and FAIR computational hydrological research

Rolf Hut1, Niels Drost2, Nick van de Giesen1, Ben van Werkhoven2, Jerom Aerts1, Fakhereh Alidoost2, Peter Kalverla2, Stefan Verhoeven2, Bouwe Andela2, Jaro Camphuijsen2, Yifat Dzigan2, Gijs van den Oord2, Inti Pelupessy2, and Barbara Vreede2
Rolf Hut et al.
  • 1Department of Water Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands (r.w.hut@tudelft.nl)
  • 2Netherlands eScience Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands

The eWaterCycle platform (https://www.ewatercycle.org/) is a fully Open Source and ‘FAIR by Design’ Platform where hydrologists can do computational hydrological research using their own, or other’s, models and data. Using eWaterCycle, computational hydrologist can focus on the hydrological part of their work, without the headache that often comes with the computational part.

In eWaterCycle experiments are separated from models: experiments are build and run in Jupyter notebooks and models can be accessed as objects in these notebooks. The models themselves are ‘hidden’ in (Docker) containers and accessed through an easy interface. This interface and the technology behind it that we’ve build allows computational hydrologists to work with (each others) models written in different programming languages without having to access that code. Currently PCRGlobWB 2.0, Hype, LISFlood, WFLOW and MARMoT are among the models supported by eWaterCycle.

Furthermore, pre-processing of atmospheric forcing data is handled transparently by ESMValTool, which separates the process of selecting and standardising variables from the steps needed to make forcing compatible with a specific model. If a source of forcing data has been made ready for one model in eWaterCycle it is easy to use it for any other. If a model has been used with one forcing data source, it is easy to swap it with another. Currently ERA5 and ERA-Interim are supported in eWaterCycle.

With eWaterCycle use cases such as (but not limited to!) these are now easier to implement:

  • Comparing two models for the same region against observation data (GRDC discharge observations are standard supported) to determine which model performs best for a given research question
  • Coupling two models (in different programming languages) to exchange information at every timestep, for example making a
  • Running a multi-model ensemble (including adding data assimilation of observations)

Previously we have announced eWaterCycle as work in progress. At the 2022 General Assembly we will demonstrate the release of v1.0 of the eWaterCycle platform, giving the computational hydrological community access to a platform that supports fully reproducible, open, and FAIR Hydrological modelling.

This work is currently under open review for publication in GMD: https://gmd.copernicus.org/preprints/gmd-2021-344/ and parts of this work have been presented at the AGU 2021 Fall Meeting.

How to cite: Hut, R., Drost, N., van de Giesen, N., van Werkhoven, B., Aerts, J., Alidoost, F., Kalverla, P., Verhoeven, S., Andela, B., Camphuijsen, J., Dzigan, Y., van den Oord, G., Pelupessy, I., and Vreede, B.: The eWaterCycle platform for open and FAIR computational hydrological research, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-7274, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-7274, 2022.

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