Hydrologic Information System

The CUAHSI HIS project—supported by the National Science Foundation—has been in operation since April 2004. This project is being conducted by a group of academic hydrologists collaborating with the San Diego Supercomputer Center as a technology partner.

HIS Project Goals Data Access - provide rapid access to a large volume of high-quality hydrologic data; Hydrologic Observatories - develop a digital watershed framework for synthesizing data and models for a hydrologic region; Hydrologic Science - strengthen place-based hydrologic science by supporting the representation of hydrologic processes with equations by an enhanced capacity to describe hydrologic environments quantitatively with data; Hydrologic Education - quantify and visualize the movement of water and chemicals in a hydrologic environment continuously in space and time.

Additional Links CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System — A live, multiscale Web portal system for accessing water observation data and models for any region in the U.S. [more info: PowerPoint | PDF] Drexel University Metadata information Hydrology Data Portal Information HIS Status Report September 15, 2005 News July, 2005 Results from the Austin Workshop - March 2005

The project's main components are . . .

• WaterOneFlow Web Services: programmatic access to a growing collection of national hydrologic observation repositories, including USGS National Water Information System, the Ameriflux tower network, a portion of the National Climate Data Center's archive, and products derived from MODIS remote sensing. [more information]
• A Hydrologic Data Access System (HDAS): web gateway into data served via CUAHSI web services, to facilitate data discovery and preliminary examination. [more information]
• An NWIS Time Series Analyst: an online charting system integrated with HDAS. [more information]
• A Hydrologic Information System Toolkit that includes hydrologic modeling tools and services, both developed in this project and contributed by others in the CUAHSI community. [more information]
• A Hydrologic Observations Data Model: a standard relational database schema for the storage of time series of point observations. [more information]
• A Hydrologic Metadata profile and controlled vocabulary for hydrologic terms and keywords to facilitate unambiguous documentation and proper interpretation of hydrologic information from diverse sources. [more information]
• Hydrologic Modeling Scientific Workflows that provide the ability to modularize hydrologic modeling tasks and operate hydrologic models as remote web services.
• A Hydrologic Observatory Collection (Illinois River Basin digital library) that indexes information sources into a digital library for a hydrologic observatory region.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 02-33842 and 03-26064.

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of  the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).