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24 posts tagged with "CIROH"

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Cross-Institutional Collaboration Enhances Hydrologic Modeling in the Logan River Watershed

· 3 min read
Bhavya Duvuri
Machine Learning Researcher
Ayman Nassar
Postdoctoral Researcher
James Halgren
Assistant Director of Science
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect
Josh Cunningham
DevOps Software Engineer
David Tarboton
Professor at Utah Water Research Laboratory
A before-and-after comparison of the corrected catchment for the Logan River. Text: 'Correcting hydrofabric by removing catchments that do not drain into gauge'
Figure 1. A corrected reach arising from the UA-USU collaboration.

Recent collaboration between researchers in the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) from University of Alabama (UA) and Utah State University (USU) highlighted the value of cross-institutional partnerships in improving community hydrologic modeling. Focused on the Logan River watershed, this joint effort demonstrated how sharing tools, knowledge, and infrastructure can accelerate both model development and scientific discovery.

Through this engagement, USU researchers gained deeper understanding of the NextGen framework and T-Route modeling library, empowering them to improve physical process representations for the Logan River watershed for heightened simulation fidelity. The collaboration also provided valuable exposure to the developmental side of complex modeling tools, offering insights into framework design, automation workflows, and best practices for model setup and calibration. Both teams benefited from exposure to alternative research tools and methods, which helped enhance and refine the community development pipeline.

One key outcome was the correction of a spatial representation in the Logan River hydrofabric (Figure 1) using the USU’s specific local knowledge. The reach for this region (highlighted in the zoomed subfigure) was updated to reflect its real world path, where it flows into an underwater tunnel that reconnects to Logan River further downstream. This correction will be integrated into the community hydrofabric, benefiting the wider community by improving model realism and reliability. Furthermore, in combination with freshly calibrated model parameters, these updates have improved the model's KGE metric by 0.2 units — a significant gain in model accuracy.

NGIAB played a central role in this success, streamlining the process of setting up, running, and analyzing multiple model configurations. By removing the typical installation and troubleshooting barriers, researchers could focus their time on advancing physical representations rather than infrastructure issues.

This collaboration sets a precedent for how community-driven, open science efforts can improve hydrologic model performance and usability. By combining localized knowledge with shared national tools, we move closer to creating reliable, reusable, and scalable flood forecasting systems, a crucial step for Research-to-Operations (R2O) success.

We look forward to repeating this model of collaboration with other regional experts and academic institutions to continually refine the National Water Model ecosystem and its supporting frameworks.

NGIAB Reaches 10,000 Docker Pulls: NextGen In A Box Makes Water Modeling More Accessible

· 4 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

NGIAB Banner

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.

Update, 8/29: NGIAB Journal Paper now available in Environmental Modelling and Software
→ Read the full paper

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.

CIROH Researchers Showcase Cutting-Edge Hydrologic Science at NHWC 2025

· 5 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect
Md Shahabul Alam
Research Scientist, University of Alabama

NHWC 2025 Banner at Tucson, Arizona

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.

AORC Data in Your Hands: User-Friendly Jupyter Notebooks for Data Retrieval and Analysis via CIROH JupyterHub Notebooks

· 3 min read
Homa Salehabadi
Postdoctoral Researcher
David Tarboton
Professor at Utah Water Research Laboratory
Ayman Nassar
Postdoctoral Researcher

Screenshot of Hydroshare Resource

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:

DevCon 2025: A DevOps and Cyberinfrastructure Success Story

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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.

Image of CIROH's Research Cyberinfrastructure and DevOps team. On the left, two graphs are shown depicting usage for the Google Cloud-2i2c and Jetstream2 environments.

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.

DevCon 2025: Hydroinformatics and Research CyberInfrastructure Keynote

· 5 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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.


Application of NOAA-OWP's NextGen Framework: DevCon 2025 and EWRI Congress 2025 Highlights

· 5 min read
Sifan A. Koriche
Research [Hydrologic] Scientist

AWI Science and Technology Team @ CIROH DevCon2025

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.

δHBV2.0: How NGIAB and Wukong HPC Streamlined Advanced Hydrologic Modeling

· 2 min read
Yalan Song
Research Assistant Professor
Leo Lonzarich
Graduate Researcher
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect
James Halgren
Assistant Director of Science

Image of graphical outputs from the δHBV2.0 model

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.

🌟 UA's Alabama Water Institute Showcases 30-Minute Hydrological Modeling Revolution🌟

· One min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

🌍 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
ngiab image

➡️ Read the full press release here!

Pennsylvania State University Researchers Leverage CIROH Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Hydrological Modeling

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect
Yalan Song
Research Assistant Professor
Tadd Bindas
Graduate Researcher

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. 🚀

CIROH at AGU 2024

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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. 📝

Community NextGen Updates

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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.

CIROH Science Meeting 2024

· 4 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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

Accessing National Water Model (NWM) Data via Google Cloud BigQuery API

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect
gcp architectrure diagram

Image Source: https://github.com/BYU-Hydroinformatics/api-nwm-gcp



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:

ProductCloud Console SQLCIROH APIHistoricalDaily Updates
Medium-range forecastsXXXX
Long-range forecastsXXXX
Analysis and AssimilationXXXX
Retrospective Data (NWM v3)XX
Return PeriodsXX

CIROH Cloud User Success Story

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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

ngen-datastream image

CIROH Research CyberInfrastructure Update

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

CIROH Developers Conference 2024

DevCon2024

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

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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: A Flood of Innovation and Inspiration

· 5 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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.

Monthly News Update - February 2024

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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.

NextGen Monthly News Update - January 2024

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

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.