Community modeling -- the development, distribution and technical support of common simulation software designed to serve the diverse needs of a community, and to be advanced through contributions from the community -- has a rich tradition in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences, but less so in hydrology. Perhaps the best-known community modeling effort in the geosciences is based at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR has a long history of developing, maintaining and supporting community atmosphere, ocean, land-surface and coupled climate models. These models supply the necessary simulation environment for numerous research groups around the world, and have provided the foundation for scores of fundamental scientific advances over the past three decades. The contributions of these models to weather, climate and global change research cannot be overstated.

CUAHSI undertook the CHyMP initiative around hydrologic modeling in 2008. The rationale was a clear need to improve the efficiency of the development of hydrological models, and the use of models to advance understanding. Improved models will lead to more reliable and more precise predictions. CUAHSI organized a series of open workshops to define the scope and requirements of a Community Hydrologic Modeling Platform (CHyMP) to develop, disseminate and support community modeling tools and simulation models. This year, a third and final workshop, A Strategic and Implementation Plan, was held March 15-17 at the Keck Center in Irvine, CA. There were 27 formal participants and 10 additional graduate students and post-docs from University of California, Irvine in attendance at the meeting. A final workshop report was submitted to NSF and is available in the Third CHyMP Workshop Report.

The CHyMP workshops were successful in bringing the water science community together, fostering academic, government and private sectors collaborations, towards scoping, designing and implementing a path toward a community modeling effort

CUAHSI will continue to advocate for activities that support this goal. The CUAHSI Board of Directors has identified this a priority.

Read the CUAHSI Position Paper on Community Modeling.

Several participants of the CHyMP workshops participated in the October 2011 NSF EarthCube Charrette.