eWaterCycle as a modelling interface between meteorology and hydrology
- 1Netherlands eScience Center, Environment and Sustainability, Amsterdam , The Netherlands (p.kalverla@esciencecenter.nl)
- 2Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
In our digital age, connecting models and data from various components of the earth system becomes more and more important. To this end, it is important to define standards and interfaces facilitate such integration. Here, we present the approach we took for eWaterCycle [1].
eWaterCycle is a fully Open Source system designed explicitly to advance the state of Open and FAIR hydrological modelling. It gives users access to a centralized platform where they can perform hydrological experiments. Complete with data, a suite of models, an interactive scripting environment, and a graphical explorer to quickly setup an experiment.
Hydrological models vary in programming language, their setup and configuration. They require differently defined inputs, and do not have a standard form of output. This makes it challenging to compare and exchange models and their inputs and output. eWaterCycle aims to solve this, so scientists can build upon each other’s work and focus on scientific questions instead of technical details.
Inside eWaterCycle, models are wrapped in a Basic Model Interface and live in their own isolated containers. We developed grpc4bmi to enable communication with models inside their containers. This means that you can talk to different models, written in a range of programming languages, in a standardized way. ESMValTool is used to generate the meteorological forcing data with reproducible recipes. Discharge observations from the USGS and GRDC are available to validate the models.
The platform comes with comprehensive documentation, including a suite of example notebooks. It also includes setup instructions for system administrators and guidance for incorporating new models. The interface between meteorology and hydrology is most prominent in the forcing generation module. Beyond that, the standards and technology used for the hydrological models in eWaterCycle can be extended to other components of the land-atmosphere continuum.
[1] https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-5371-2022
How to cite: Kalverla, P. C., Verhoeven, S., Schilperoort, B., Alidoost, S., Liu, Y., Drost, N., Aerts, J., and Hut, R.: eWaterCycle as a modelling interface between meteorology and hydrology, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-480, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-480, 2023.
