HydroTerre: Towards an expert system for scaling models from hillslopes to major river basins

Abstract:

HydroTerre (www.hydroterre.psu.edu) is an expert system that serves Essential Terrestrial Variables (ETVs) data for hydrological modelling anywhere in the continental United States of America (CONUS), using distributed computing resources and web services. This talk will discuss the development of the expert system that supports these services as a resource for the larger water research community to improve the hydrological modeling process. This is achieved by providing modelers with access to hydrological data and model results that scale from hill-slopes to major-river basins anywhere in the CONUS. HydroTerre, consists of three processes:

• Data workflows that automate the functionality of collecting and processing essential variables for hydrological models anywhere in the US.
• Model workflows that consume the data processes and automatically scale and transform the data into model inputs and generate efficient Penn State Integrated Hydrological Models (PIHM).
• Visual analytic workflows that disseminate the PIHM model process results appropriately per scale and make it feasible for modelers to analyze both the data and model results, finding new features and details otherwise not possible.