23 posts tagged with "CIROH"

We're thrilled to announce that NextGen In A Box (NGIAB) has surpassed 10,000 Docker pulls — a significant milestone reflecting the growing adoption of water modeling tools that are accessible to all. This achievement creates opportunities for researchers, practitioners, and students worldwide to leverage advanced water prediction frameworks without infrastructure barriers, accelerating global water science innovation.

From Research Innovation to Community Tool​

When we first containerized the NextGen Water Resources Modeling Framework into NGIAB, our goal was simple yet ambitious: remove the technical barriers that prevented many researchers from accessing NOAA's next-generation water modeling capabilities.

Today, with over 10,000 downloads, it's clear the community was ready for this transformation.

The University of Alabama recently highlighted NGIAB's impact in their news feature, "UA Software Makes Water Modeling More Accessible", recognizing how this tool is changing the landscape of hydrologic research and education. As the article notes, NGIAB turns what was once a complex, infrastructure-heavy process into something that researchers can run on their laptops in minutes.

What 10,000 Pulls Really Means​

Behind this number are stories of:

🎓 Graduate students exploring advanced modeling techniques with no setup headaches

🏫 Educators bringing cutting-edge tools into the classroom

🏢 Researchers at smaller institutions gaining access to national-scale modeling

🌍 International collaborators contributing to water modeling advancement without infrastructure constraints

🚨 Emergency managers rapidly deploying models for flood prediction

Community Growth and Impact​

The rapid adoption of NGIAB reflects a broader movement:

1. Democratization of Advanced Modeling
No longer do researchers need access to specialized HPC resources or deep DevOps knowledge to run sophisticated water models. NGIAB levels the playing field.

2. Reproducible Science
Every one of those 10,000 pulls represents the exact same computational environment, ensuring that research results can be replicated anywhere in the world.

3. Accelerated Innovation
By removing setup friction, researchers can focus on science rather than software configuration, leading to faster iterations and discoveries.

Looking Forward: The Next 10,000​

As we celebrate this milestone, we're already working on what's next:

📦 Expanded model library: Adding more BMI-compliant models to the NGIAB ecosystem

☁️ Cloud integration: Seamless deployment on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure

📊 Enhanced visualization: Built-in tools for analyzing and presenting model outputs

🤝 Community contributions: Making it easier for users to share their configurations and improvements

Join the NGIAB Community​

Whether you're pull number 10,001 or have been with us since the beginning, you're part of a growing community that's transforming water resources modeling.

Here's how to get involved:

👉 Try NGIAB: Visit the NGIAB 101 tutorial to get started

✍️ Share your use case: Tell us how you're using NGIAB in your research or operations

🛠 Contribute: Submit bug reports, feature requests, or code contributions

📢 Spread the word: Help others discover how NGIAB can accelerate their water modeling work

Thank You to Our Community​

This milestone belongs to everyone who downloaded, tested, provided feedback, contributed code, or helped spread the word about NGIAB. Your engagement drives our continuous improvement and motivates us to make water modeling even more accessible.

As we reflect on reaching 10,000 Docker pulls, we're reminded that each download represents a researcher, student, or practitioner working to better understand and predict our water resources. Together, we're building a more resilient future through accessible, advanced water modeling.

Here's to the next 10,000 pulls and the continued growth of our community!

NGIAB is developed and maintained by the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) at the University of Alabama. Learn more about our work in making water modeling accessible at ciroh.org.

CIROH team at NHWC 2025 in Tucson, Arizona, standing by the event’s official banner.

CIROH had a strong showing at the 15th Biennial National Hydrologic Warning Conference (NHWC 2025), with our researchers presenting innovative solutions and engaging with the broader hydrologic warning community. The conference brought together field personnel, innovators, engineers, hydrologists, forecasters, water resource managers, and emergency management officials from across the country to advance flood warning systems and address emerging challenges in evolving climate and drought management.

Advancing Model Reliability in Hydrologic Forecasting​

During the NextGen presentation track, moderated by Dr. Steve Burian, CIROH researchers focused on improving evaluation techniques for hydrologic models—particularly in the context of the National Water Model (NWM).

NWS NextGen Program​

Edwin Welles from Deltares USA presenting the NextGen framework.

Edwin Welles from Deltares USA kicked things off with insights into a groundbreaking initiative. The Office of Water Prediction, of the National Weather Service has undertaken an ambitious project to implement and apply a new framework for hydrological modeling: the The Next Genearation Water Resources Modeling Framework, or the NextGen framework, is designed to emphasize modularity, interoperability, and reproducibility, creating an environment where disparate modeling components can be freely combined to enhance modeling capabilities. These advantages offer critical support to the National Water Model, alongside other key initiatives such as national Flood Inundation Mapping research. The system is being implemented by Raytheon with subcontract support from Deltares USA. His presentation provided a summary of the project and envisioned outcomes.

Leading the NextGen Revolution​

Arpita Patel presenting “Navigating the NextGen Ecosystem and NextGen In A Box (NGIAB).”

Arpita Patel followed with “Navigating the NextGen Ecosystem and NextGen In A Box (NGIAB),” a presentation focused on making the NextGen framework more accessible to researchers, forecasters, and water managers. This was achieved through the NextGen In A Box platform, which harnesses containerization and supportive tooling to make the NextGen framework accessible and easy to use. This work directly supports CIROH’s mission to democratize access to advanced hydrologic modeling capabilities and foster broader adoption of next-generation water prediction tools.

🥉 Patel also demonstrated exceptional engagement throughout the conference. Her outstanding participation earned her an impressive #3 ranking on the NHWC 2025 conference leaderboard with 70,200 points. This demonstrated not only her technical expertise, but also her active involvement in conference activities and community engagement.

Rethinking Evaluation​

Dr. Md Shahabul Alam presenting different model evaluation methods.

Dr. Md Shahabul Alam also delivered a compelling talk titled “Rethinking Model Reliability: A Dual Evaluation of NWM Using Time Series and Extreme Events” during the NextGen program track. His work focuses on advancing operational hydrology by developing more rigorous and resilient methods to evaluate the National Water Model across varying temporal scales and extreme event conditions—a crucial step in improving forecasting and decision-making under a changing climate. This work represents CIROH’s commitment to enhancing the reliability and accuracy of national-scale hydrologic prediction systems, directly supporting the operational forecasting community’s need for trustworthy model outputs during both routine conditions and extreme weather events.

🥇 Dr. Alam earned also earned the #1 ranking on the NHWC 2025 conference leaderboard, maintaining a commanding lead of over 100,000 points throughout the week and finishing with a remarkable 194,700 points. His name quickly became a focal point of the conference. Each morning, attendees checked the Whova app with anticipation—only to see Shahab had once again pulled further ahead. His energetic participation and engaging presence made him a standout at the conference, combining technical depth with social and technological savvy. Dr. Alam not only demonstrated exceptional leadership and charisma at the NHWC 2025 conference, but also brought well-deserved visibility to CIROH and its ongoing mission.

Strengthening Community Connections​

The inclusion of these presentations within the NextGen presentation track highlights CIROH’s central role in advancing the NextGen Water Resources Modeling Framework. This alignment demonstrates our organization’s commitment to translating research innovations into operational capabilities that serve the broader water resources community.

Following the presentations, many researchers expressed immediate interest in using NextGen In A Box for both their research applications and operational forecasting. The tool's modular design, ease of deployment, and compatibility with diverse datasets resonated strongly with attendees seeking flexible and scalable modeling solutions. Several participants noted its potential for accelerating innovation in hydrologic modeling and expressed intent to integrate it into their ongoing and future projects.

The conference provided valuable opportunities for our researchers to connect with operational forecasters, emergency managers, and fellow scientists, fostering collaborations that will enhance the real-world impact of CIROH’s research initiatives. These interactions are essential for ensuring our scientific advances address the practical challenges faced by those responsible for flood warning and water resource management.

Looking Ahead​

CIROH’s strong presence at NHWC 2025 underscores our dedication to bridging the gap between research and operations in hydrologic science. Our researchers’ contributions to model evaluation methodologies and NextGen ecosystem development represent key steps toward more reliable, accessible, and effective water prediction systems.

As we continue to advance hydrologic science, conferences like NHWC 2025 provide essential platforms for sharing innovations, gathering feedback from the operational community, and building the collaborative relationships that drive progress in water resources management and flood warning systems.

The success of our team at NHWC 2025 reflects CIROH’s growing impact in the hydrologic sciences community and our commitment to developing solutions that serve both scientific advancement and societal needs.

A screenshot of the HydroShare resource page for Jupyter Notebooks for the Retrieval of AORC Data for Hydrologic Analysis.

The Analysis of Record for Calibration (AORC) dataset is recognized as a high-value resource for the CUAHSI and CIROH community. This dataset is hosted by NOAA via Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is available in two primary formats: a latitude-longitude gridded dataset and the National Water Model (NWM) projected dataset, part of the NWM Retrospective archive. To enhance accessibility and illustrate analysis capabilities, we developed four user-friendly Jupyter Notebooks that enable data retrieval for both specific points of interest and spatial domains defined by shapefiles:

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.

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.

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.

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 released 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.