Presented by: Sudipta K. Mishra

Project overview:  How much water do we have? How will it change in response to climate variation, human development patterns (land use change), and economic activities? Answering these questions is a central challenge for hydrologic science and hence need a holistic approach which can enable linkages between different kinds of data, models and different domains.  These grand challenges of hydrologic synthesis can be achieved through certain useful tools e.g. Open modeling framework (OpenMI) developed under European Harmon IT project; Hydro Desktop (an American adaptation) and these tools are reviewed through this project.

Hydro-synthesis across boundaries

OpenMI Framework:  What is OpenMI? The OpenMI standard defines an interface that allows time- dependent models to exchange data at runtime.  OpenMI Aims and Objectives: The aim of the OpenMI is to provide a mechanism by which physical and socioeconomic process models can be linked to each other, to other data sources and to a variety of tools at runtime, hence enabling process interactions to be better modeled.

…contd.

Hydrologic synthesis: European perspective  OpenMI framework: Development stages The first version of the OpenMI has been developed by a team drawn from 14 organizations (lead by HR Wallingford, UK) and seven countries co-funded through the European Commission’s Fifth Framework programme under HarmonIT project. Steps and stakeholders in OpenMI development are discussed in brief here:  (a) European Commission (EC): Executive body of EU Proposes and implements legislation One Commissioner from each member state.  (b) Water Framework Directive (WFD): It defines standards and procedures and requirements for whole catchment modeling within 2015 across Europe Unions.  (c) Fifth Framework programme (FP5): It allots about 15b euro for implementation of programs in following area: Quality of Life and management of living resources, User-friendly information society and Competitive and sustainable growth  (d) HarmonIT: Supported by FP5’s Energy, environment and sustainable development program. It objective is to develop, implement and prove a system to simplify the linking of models to support whole catchment modeling

OpenMI adaptation, migration and applications: OpenMI SWAT adaptation at UNESCO-IHE, Delft Applying OpenMI framework for understanding hydrological and climate model interaction at DHI, Europe

American context: HydroDesktop HydroDesktop is a free and open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) application that helps to discover, use, and manage hydrologic time series data. The GIS components are built from MapWindow 6, while the time series components utilize web services designed by the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information Systems (CUAHSI-HIS) project.

…contd. Key Functionality:  A. Data Discovery: HIS Desktop supports two different methods of data discovery: (1) ontology-based discovery across all WaterOneFlow web services that have been registered at HIS Central and for which metadata has been harvested and stored in the HIS Central metadata catalog; and (2) Discovery of data within a single WaterOneFlow web service that has not been registered at HIS Central.  B. Data Download: The goal of the HIS Desktop data download functionality is to retrieve observational data series that have been identified for download using the data discovery tools described above and to create a local cache copy of the data in the desktop data database.  C. Data Visualization, Manipulation, and Export: HIS Desktop supports visualization of both geospatial and time series data. Geospatial data visualization is enabled through an interactive GIS map using the open source MapWindow GIS components.

Concluding remark: International Perspectives in Water Resources Science and Management (IPWRSM) 2010 course was a great opportunity to interact with the peers from some of the world’s best known Institutes. Knowledge gained through exchanging views and ideas with peers abroad will be valuable for author’s future research and will help him in growing as a researcher.

Acknowledgements: Websites Acknowledgement: Some of the pictures and contents are adapted from the following websites: elling.aspx rd+review