Developing a TeraGrid Based Land Surface Hydrology and Weather Modeling Interface

Real world hydrologic and environmental problems are often challenged by several factors such as (i) the curse of dimensionality and scale, (ii) data that tend to be very highdimensional, heterogeneous, and sparse, and (iii) uncertainty of data availability. In order to address such challenges, the need for a flexible and scalable cyberinfrastructure (CI) has been articulated in many workshops and meetings of the environmental and hydrologic engineering communities. Specifically, one of the stated thrusts of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) is to enable new science though data discovery, delivery, publication, and curation (http://www.cuahsi.org/his.html). The CI needs for the WATer and Environmental Research Systems (WATERS) community have been described in the WATERS Network Cyberinfrastructure Plan (http://www.watersnet.org/plngdocs.html). A CI that supports the incorporation of data directly into a full range of models, calibration of models, and comparisons with observations has been identified as a key element that will lead to improved understanding and predictability. An integrated multidisciplinary project with participation of computer scientists, environmental engineers, hydrologists, atmospheric scientists, and education specialists is currently underway. Under the title of Cyberinfrastructure for End-to-End Environmental Explorations (C4E4), this multi-disciplinary team utilizes current developments in data engineering: distributed storage, cataloguing, metadata management, data transfer, data mining, and data fusion to address hydrologic and environmental questions, as well as environmental data management and integration in real-world settings. The C4E4 allows researchers to combine heterogeneous data resources with state-of-the-art modeling and visualization tools through a web portal. As a prototype, fusion of data and models has been undertaken by the C4E4 team over the St. Joseph watershed in Northern Indiana. The scientific questions that drive C4E4 are largely related to the effects of human activity on the quality of air, land, and water resources. The computation-intensive models are supported by resources on the TeraGrid. Apart from fulfilling a research mission, C4E4 also integrates teaching and learning forum. This is achieved by vertical integration of undergraduate, graduate and post doctoral researchers, working and utilizing different components of the project for their research. The C4E4 framework is also being used for the informal science education mission by providing linkages with university extension services. This paper describes the vision, status of ongoing coupling activities, and the next steps for the C4E4/TeraGrid exploratory. The paper builds on a prior paper by Zhao et al. (2007), which outlined the water quality/hydrological modeling interface using a Surface Water Analysis Tool (SWAT). The focus of the current paper is to discuss the meteorological and regional hydrometeorological setup. The capability of coupling models of different scales through shared datasets and easily comparing model output with observations provides an important tool for students who conduct research in hydrometeorological and climate studies. The integrated vision is presented in section 2. Our past work on SWAT modeling is described in section 3, followed by the data integration activity in section 4. Section 5 lists a summary of models and the design configurations over the C4E4 study region. Section 6 summarizes the educational impact.