You may have noticed that the CUAHSI Web site has a new look. Many of the changes are cosmetic, but the more important changes are “under the hood” – in the technical design of the site. They ensure that the site is more manageable and maintainable as well as more navigable for the visitor. In addition, CUAHSI has taken out a second, ancillary domain name — hydrologicscience.org — in order to provide enhanced database services such as ColdFusion and DotNetNuke. We are using ColdFusion for the Hydrologic Instrumentation Marketplace (aka, Hydro-Bay), for workshops (e.g., the October 2006 PUB Workshop in Corvallis), and for visitor feedback forms. Navigation between the two domains is in most instances transparent to a visitor and there are strong inter-domain linkages so hopefully one does not get lost or stranded while visiting either domain.
We have also implemented a “Job Opportunities” page in the CUAHSI domain. We hope to use this page to communicate opportunities for graduate students and other research-related activities. If you have an opportunity you would like to broadcast to the community, please forward your information to the CUAHSI Webmaster at webmaster@cuahsi.org.
Paths ForwardCLEANER
CUAHSI is working with the CLEANER Program Office (CPO), supported by the Engineering Directorate of the NSF, in the design of an observatory network, tentatively entitled the WATer and Engineering Research System (WATERS) Network. CLEANER has been holding a series of meetings over the past six months to define the environmental engineering community vision for and functional requirements of observatories. In addition, a joint CUAHSI CLEANER workshop was held in November, 2005 that generated a great deal of synergy between the engineering and hydrologic science communities. A common observatory could serve both communities. Further details on the conceptual design will be developed in the latter half of 2006.
Science Advisory Team
Producing an effective science and adequate implementation plan for CUAHSI has been a challenging goal. After reviewing past efforts, the CUAHSI Board of Directors decided to empanel a new Science Advisory Team at its meeting in Chicago in June, 2005. Led by John Wilson (New Mexico Tech) and ably assisted by Kevin Dressler (Penn State), the team has been working on a new science plan for the community, which should be released this summer. Community input will be sought through cyberseminars and regional meetings planned for late Summer and Fall 2006.
Cyberseminars
Chris Paola, NCED and Sue Brantley, CZEN: An Integrated Approach to Earth Surface Science April 20th 3:00pm ET.
Peter Wilcock, JHU and Jeff Marr, NCED: Streamlab06: A community virtual experiment April 28th 3:00pm ET.
WaterOneFlow Web Services
The CUAHSI community has identified a need for access to a large volume of high quality hydrologic data and the Hydrologic Information System team has shown that this need can be met by “web services” which provide direct access to national data archives without the need to manually use web pages. The most complete set of services presently available is to the USGS National Water Information System, but some services are also available for the Ameriflux tower network, the NCAR DayMet system, and NASA MODIS data. Information about these services can be accessed from the CUAHSI web site at: www.cuahsi.org/his/webservices.html.
We have entitled these services “WaterOneFlow” because they are intended to provide a common data window by which data can be extracted from national data archives, transformed into a common format, and then loaded into a user’s application. At present, the main applications for which the services have been prototyped are Excel, ArcGIS and Visual Basic, and some progress has also been made ingestion of data into Matlab. Other data sources being researched at present include EPA Storet, the LTER Climdb and Hydrodb data, USGS NAWQA data and real-time precipitation forecasts from Unidata.
Data services for a point observation network are provided at three levels:
- GetSites – identifies the sites where data are measured;
- GetVariables – identifies the variables measured at a given site;
- GetValues – obtains the observed values of a given parameter at a given site.
For the USGS NWIS system, a map interface to these services is provided in the Hydrologic Data Access System at http://river.sdsc.edu/HDAS.
