4 posts tagged with "NGIAB"

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 that would normally cost thousands of dollars.
• Datasets that would take months to compile.
• Tools that streamline research and increase its impact.

We also highlighted several key tools within the CIROH ecosystem that are pushing hydrology forward:

• NGIAB (NextGen In A Box) ecosystem: Provides power and portability to the NextGen water modeling framework through leading open-source software development.
• CIROH's DocuHub: A central repository for documentation, as well as a platform for monthly blog and news updates.
• CIROH Portal: Facilitates to data, tools, and research findings.
• Google BigQuery NWM API: An efficient alternative for accessing and querying National Water Model data.
• Tethys Platform: Empowers intuitive, accessible web applications to deliver data and model results.
• Pantarhei and Wukong HPC: CIROH's high-performance computing cluster for demanding computations.
• And many more!

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 hydroinformatics, 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!