The recent DevCon 2025 event showcased not just cutting-edge development practices, but also demonstrated how modern DevOps principles and cloud infrastructure can seamlessly support large-scale technical workshops. Our team had the privilege of providing IT infrastructure and support for over 200 attendees, creating a robust learning environment through an exemplary public-private partnership.

CIROH's Research Cyberinfrastructure and DevOps team.
Left to right, top to bottom:
Manjila Singh, Arpita Patel, Nia Minor, Trupesh Patel, James Halgren; Benjamin Lee.

The Power of Collaboration​

DevCon 2025 represented an outstanding example of what's possible when public institutions and private enterprises work together:

• Corporate Sponsors: AWS and Google Cloud provided funding and infrastructure for the event.
• Infrastructure Partners: NSF JetStream and 2i2c JupyterHub delivered the computational backbone.
• Technical Implementation: The CIROH Research Cyberinfrastructure and DevOps Team managed IT access and software packaging.

Our Technical Approach​

Supporting 200+ workshop attendees required careful planning and execution. Our DevOps team and partners implemented:

Infrastructure as Code​

• Automated deployment of workshop environments
• Scalable JupyterHub instances configured for concurrent users
• Pre-packaged software environments ensuring consistency across all workstations

Cloud-Native Solutions​

• Leveraged AWS S3 bucket and Google Cloud BigQuery
• Implemented auto-scaling to handle peak workshop loads
• Ensured high availability across multiple availability zones

Seamless User Experience​

• Single sign-on authentication for 100+ participants using CIROH 2i2c JupyterHub's new WORKSHOP Hub!!
• Pre-configured JetStream2 environments with all necessary tools
• Real-time support slack channels for immediate issue resolution

Key Achievements​

• Zero Downtime: Maintained 100% uptime throughout the entire event
• Rapid Onboarding: All 200 attendees were able to access their environments within minutes
• Consistent Experience: Every participant had identical, fully-functional development environments
• Real-time Support: Our team resolved technical issues with average response time under 5 minutes

Lessons Learned​

This event perfectly demonstrated how DevOps principles—bridging development and operations—combined with cloud computing can transform organizational capabilities. Key takeaways include:

1. Automation is Essential: Pre-event automation allowed us to focus on attendee support rather than infrastructure management.
2. Public-Private Partnerships Work: Combining Google Cloud services, AWS services, 2i2c services and NSF's research infrastructure created a best-of-class research workshops solution.
3. Preparation Prevents Problems: Our extensive pre-event testing and redundancy planning paid dividends during the live event.

Looking Forward​

The success of DevCon 2025's IT infrastructure demonstrates that large-scale technical events no longer need to be limited by traditional IT constraints. By embracing DevOps practices and leveraging cloud partnerships, we can create learning environments that scale effortlessly while maintaining reliability and performance.

We're proud to have supported the DevCon 2025 community and look forward to applying these lessons to future events. The combination of public research infrastructure, private cloud resources, and dedicated DevOps expertise created an environment where 200+ developers could focus on learning and innovation without worrying about technical barriers.

Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to co-present a keynote at the CIROH Developers Conference (DevCon 2025), which attracted over 200 attendees. This presentation, which I presented alongside Dan Ames, focused on "CIROH HydroInformatics and Research Cyberinfrastructure." It was a fantastic experience to share insights into the powerful tools and technologies that CIROH engineers, students, researchers have been developing to advance hydrological research and operations.

Our keynote aimed to showcase the comprehensive ecosystem that CIROH offers. We highlighted four key pillars:

• Computing Resources: CIROH offers accress to public cloud infrastructure, on-premises HPC, and NSF ACCESS resources.
• Data Management: CIROH members handle and share vast datasets crucial for hydrological modeling. We've provided platforms to do so through HydroShare and CIROH AWS S3 buckets, as well as streamlining access and analysis of this data through tools like Google BigQuery API and Tethys Platform.
• Model Development: CIROH develops tools and frameworks for developing and refining hydrological models, including the NGIAB ecosystem.
• Knowledge Sharing: CIROH disseminates findings and best practices through the DocuHub and Portal platforms.

Value and Impact​

During the keynote, we emphasized the value that CIROH brings to new students and researchers. This includes access to:

• Computational resources (free for researchers) that would normally cost thousands of dollars.
• Datasets that would take months to compile.
• Tools that streamline research and increase its impact.
• Publications - https://portal.ciroh.org/publications

CIROH Ecosystem Tools

We also showcased several transformative tools within the CIROH ecosystem that are advancing the field of hydrology:

• NGIAB (NextGen In A Box) ecosystem (ngiab.ciroh.org): Revolutionizes water modeling by making the NextGen framework portable and accessible through containerized, open-source solutions.
• CIROH DocuHub (docs.ciroh.org): Your comprehensive knowledge center featuring technical documentation, monthly insights, and the latest developments in water science.
• CIROH Portal (portal.ciroh.org): A unified gateway connecting researchers to essential data, cutting-edge tools, and collaborative research opportunities.
• Google BigQuery NWM API (Documentation): Streamlines National Water Model data access with powerful cloud-based querying capabilities for efficient analysis.
• Tethys Platform: Transforms complex hydrological data and models into intuitive web applications, making advanced water science accessible to all stakeholders.
• AWS, Google Cloud, 2i2c JupyterHub and NSF Access: CIROH's AWS, Google Cloud accounts, CIROH 2i2c JupyuterHub and NSF Allocations for cloud computing in hydrology.
• Pantarhei and Wukong HPC: CIROH's state-of-the-art high-performance computing infrastructure, powering computationally intensive research and simulations.
• And many more innovative solutions driving water science forward!

Our overall message was that CIROH’s hydroinformatics and research cyberinfrastructure ecosystem is designed to support and amplify research efforts. We encouraged attendees to explore these resources and consider how they could be applied to their own work. Whether it's streamlining data workflows, tackling computationally intensive tasks, or sharing findings, CIROH provides the tools and infrastructure to push the boundaries of hydrological science.

We want to thank everyone who attended our keynote and engaged in the Mentimeter quiz. It’s an exciting time for CIROH, and we’re thrilled to be a part of this dynamic community!

Video voiced by Quinn Lee and prepared by Manjila Singh, Nia Minor, and Arpita Patel.

CIROH-AWI Science and Technology Team.
Left to right: Sagy Cohen, Steven Burian, Manjila Singh, Saide Zand, Savalan N. Neisary, Arpita Patel, Nia Minor, Trupesh Patel, Sifan A. Koriche, Jonathan Frame, Reza S. Alipour, Hari T. Jajula, Chad Perry; Josh Cunningham.

May was a pivotal month for representing the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) and our collective work in advancing water science. As one of CIROH's Ambassadors, I had the privilege of connecting with the broader scientific community at two key events: the Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI) Congress in Anchorage, Alaska, and the 2025 CIROH Developers Conference in Burlington, Vermont.

Empowering the Community at the 2025 CIROH Developers Conference​

The annual CIROH Developers Conference is a premier three-day event that convenes hundreds of scientists, engineers, and software developers from across the consortium and its partner institutions. It serves as a vital hub for innovation and collaboration, where attendees engage with the latest research findings, project highlights, and hands-on workshops on cutting-edge tools, workflows, and methodologies.

For me, this year's conference in the beautiful city of Burlington, Vermont, felt like coming full circle, as it marked my one-year anniversary since joining the consortium through The University of Alabama.

I had the privilege of leading a hands-on training workshop on hydrological model calibration. It was a fantastic experience engaging with the talented developers, researchers, and scientists who are all dedicated to the advancement and acceleration of Community Water Resources Modeling. Our session provided comprehensive, hands-on guidance for calibrating one of core components of the NextGen National Water Model model-confifuration—specifically the Conceptial Functional Equivalent (CFE) coupled with Noah-OWP-Modular—within the NextGen In A Box (NGIAB) ecosystem.

The NGIAB ecosystem is a comprehensive platform that revolutionizes how we approach hydrological research with integrated capabilities for:

• ✨ 1. Data preprocessing
• ⚙️ 2. Hydrology model simulations and calibration
• 📊 3. Advanced evaluation tools
• 📈 4. Rich visualization capabilities

A huge thank you to CIROH for organizing such an insightful conference, and to the University of Vermont for being an excellent host!

For everyone who attended or is interested in learning more, all training materials, codes, and data from the workshop are openly available in our GitHub repository:

➡️ NGIAB-Calibration-DevCon25 Workshop Materials
➡️ More NextGen Workshops: DocuHub News; May 2025 Updates

I'm inspired by the passion for innovation shown and look forward to seeing how the community leverages these tools to advance water modeling.

Disseminating Research at the EWRI Congress​

The EWRI Congress was a valuable opportunity to disseminate our research and connect with hundreds of engineers and scientists. I had the privilege of delivering three oral presentations that showcase the use-inspired science outcomes emerging from the CIROH Science and Technology Team and our partners.

1. Advancing Hydrologic Modeling through Community-Driven Development: The NextGen Framework​

This presentation introduced the Community NextGen initiative, a collaborative effort aimed at fostering open innovation and accelerating the framework's development. These efforts aim to facilitate efficient research-to-operations (R2O) and operations-to-research (O2R) transitions, ultimately enhancing our ability to model and predict water resources at various scales.

2. Enhancing Catchment Based Hydrological Model Performance through Dynamic Sub-Discretization Using Land Surface Attributes​

This talk addressed how the simplifications in lumped models can lead to reduced accuracy when applied uniformly in catchments with significant land-surface heterogeneity. The study explores the potential to enhance lumped model performance by introducing dynamic discretization based on key land-surface heterogeneities such as land use, soil type and soil layering, slope aspect, and elevation.

3. Multi-model Predictions of Design Low Flow Conditions in the Great Salt Lake Basin Using NextGen Water Resources Modeling Framework​

This research focused on the challenge of accurately estimating low flow conditions in ungauged basins, such as those in the Great Salt Lake (GSL) region. The study paves the way to investigate how different models perform in predicting design low flow, a critical standard for water supply planning, management, and ensuring water quality in the GSL basin at both gauged and ungauged locations.

These works directly reflects the ongoing efforts and use-inspired science outcomes of the CIROH Science and Technology Team and Partners across the consortium. The congress served as a successful platform for showcasing these advancements and CIROH's leadership in community-driven, next-generation water resource prediction.

Predicting water flow with precision across the vast U.S. landscape is a complex challenge. That's why Song et al. 2024 developed δHBV2.0, a cutting-edge hydrologic model. It’s built with high-resolution modeling of physics to deliver seamless, highly accurate streamflow simulations, even down to individual sub-basins. It's already proven to be a major improvement, performing better than older tools at about 4,000 measurement sites. We also provide a comprehensive 40-year water dataset for ~180,000 river reaches to support this.

Penn State research group pushed δHBV2.0 further, training it with even more detailed river data and integrating other trusted models, aiming to make it a key part of the NextGen national water modeling system (as a potential NWM3.0 successor). But here’s a common hurdle: making powerful scientific tools like this easy and reliable for everyone to use within a larger framework can be tough. Setup issues, runtime errors, and inconsistent results can frustrate users.

NGIAB stepped in to solve exactly this problem. Team has taken the complexity out of using the operations-ready models within NextGen by creating one unified, reliable package. Thanks to NGIAB, users don't have to worry about tricky setups or whether the model will run correctly. NGIAB ensures that our models are compatible everywhere and, most importantly, that they run exactly as designed, consistently and faithfully, every single time, no babysitting required. This means users get the full power of our advanced modeling, without the headaches.

🌍 AWI News​

The Alabama Water Institute (AWI) at the University of Alabama (UA) recently published an article highlighting how NextGen In A Box (NGIAB) could transform hydrological modeling. This article provides great insight into NGIAB's real-world impact:

• 🚀30-minute setup vs days/weeks of configuration
• 📖 Provo River Basin Case Study demonstrating rapid deployment

➡️ Read the full press release here!

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) researchers have been leveraging CIROH Cyberinfrastructure to tackle complex hydrological modeling challenges. This post highlights their innovative approach using the Wukong computing platform in conjunction with Amazon S3 bucket storage to efficiently process and analyze large-scale environmental datasets. 🚀

AGU24 brought together the world’s leading minds in Earth and space sciences. CIROH participated actively, showcasing advances in water prediction, modeling techniques and many more technologies.

Presentations and Posters 📊​

The conference provided an excellent platform for CIROH researchers to present their groundbreaking work. Our team delivered impactful presentations and poster sessions highlighting CIROH’s innovative work, including advancements in water prediction systems and community water modeling.

These sessions sparked thought-provoking discussions and fostered collaborations with other researchers. For those who missed it, posters and presentation slides are now available here. Feel free to explore these materials and share your thoughts. 📝

The Community NextGen framework has seen significant advancements in November 2024, with major updates across multiple components and exciting new resources for users. Let's dive into the key developments that are making hydrologic modeling more accessible and powerful than ever.

The 2024 CIROH Science Meeting was a huge success, bringing together researchers, federal partners, and consortium members both in person and virtually. We're excited to share the valuable resources from this year's meeting with the wider CIROH community.

Slides and pictures from the various sessions, keynotes, and the Federal Town Hall have all been uploaded to a shared drive for easy access. You can find links to these materials here: Access the Shared Drive with Presentation Slides

Several important historical and ongoing National Water Model (NWM) datasets are now available on Google Cloud BigQuery, which makes them queryable through SQL using Google Cloud console. Some of these data sets are also accessible through an API (e.g. using Python). These datasets and their current status are as follows:

This month, we are excited to showcase two case studies that utilized our cyberinfrastructure tools and services. These case studies demonstrate how CIROH's cyberinfrastructure is being utilized to support hydrological research and operational advancements.

1. ngen-datastream and NGIAB​

We're excited to share some recent developments and updates from CIROH's Research CyberInfrastructure team:

Cloud Infrastructure​

• CIROH's Google Cloud Account is now fully operational and managed by our team. You can find more information here.
• We're in the process of migrating our 2i2c JupyterHub to CIROH's Google Cloud account.
• We've successfully deployed the Google BigQuery API (developed by BYU and Google) for NWM data in our cloud. To access this API, please contact us at ciroh-it-admin@ua.edu. Please refer to NWM BigQuery API to learn more.

CIROH Developers Conference 2024

The CIROH team recently participated in the 2nd Annual CIROH Developers Conference (DevCon24), held from May 29th to June 1st,2024. The conference brought together a diverse group of water professionals to exchange knowledge and explore cutting-edge research in the field of hydrological forecasting.

AWRA 2024 Spring Conference

The CIROH CyberInfrastructure team recently participated in the AWRA 2024 Spring Conference, co-hosted by the Alabama Water Institute at the University of Alabama.

Themed "Water Risk and Resilience: Research and Sustainable Solutions," the conference brought together a diverse group of water professionals to exchange knowledge and explore cutting-edge research in the field.

Google Cloud Next '24

Hello everyone, and thanks for stopping by!

I recently had the incredible opportunity to attend Google Cloud Next 2024 in person for the first time, and it was truly an amazing experience. From insightful keynote presentations and workshops to vibrant booths buzzing with connections, the event was a whirlwind of innovation and inspiration.

The CIROH team has been diligently accelerating research cyberinfrastructure capabilities this month. We're thrilled to share key milestones achieved in enhancing the Community NextGen project and our cloud/on-premises platforms.

Welcome to the February edition of the CIROH DocuHub blog, where we bring you the latest updates and news about the Community NextGen project and CIROH's Cloud and on-premise Infrastructure.

Our team has been hard at work enhancing CIROH's Infrastructure and Community NextGen tools. Here are some highlights from February 2024:

1. We successfully launched our new On-premises Infrastructure, which is now fully operational. You can find documentation for it here.

Welcome to the January edition of the CIROH DocuHub blog, where we share the latest updates and news about the Community NextGen project monthly. NextGen is a cutting-edge hydrologic modeling framework that aims to advance the science and practice of hydrology and water resources management. In this month's blog, we will highlight some of the recent achievements and developments of the Community NextGen team.

We've release NGIAB v1.1.0! This release fixes issues:

• #21
• #67
• #44

More info: https://github.com/CIROH-UA/NGIAB-CloudInfra/releases/tag/v1.1.0

Visit NGIAB News

NextGen Framework Forcings​

A new forcing processor tool has been made public. This tool converts any National Water Model based forcing files into ngen forcing files. This process can be an intensive operation in compute, memory, and IO, so this tool facilitates generating ngen input and ultimately makes running ngen more accessible.