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HMS: Hydrologic Micro Services
Citation:
Wolfe, K., R. Parmar, Chris Knightes, D. Smith, M. Galvin, J. Koblich, J. Sitterson, JohnM Johnston, AND Tom Purucker. HMS: Hydrologic Micro Services. 2018 iEMSs, Fort Collins, CO, June 24 - 28, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Hydrologic Micro Services (HMS) is a collection of software components for developing hydrologic and water quality modeling workflows. HMS components are available as RESTful web services as well as desktop libraries. An HMS component may have multiple implementations addressing varying levels of underlying physical process details and assumptions. Desktop and web-based workflows can be developed using HMS components as desktop libraries or as web services. A workflow can call into a specific implementation of an HMS component depending upon the details suitable for the workflow. Building a workflow from HMS components enables modelers to address hydrological and water quality problem statements more precisely, in contrast to the current state of modeling where a problem statement is generally addressed by selecting an existing model. In the current state, the selected model may not have the appropriate level of complexity. The model may not address all parts of the problem statement without making less desirable assumptions, or the model may have more features and requirements than necessary. HMS components include data provisioning and simulation algorithms for water quantity and quality modeling. In addition, HMS components can be used by themselves or they can be linked together to develop workflows, which in turn can be used as components in larger workflows. For example, precipitation data provisioning components can download data from various data sources such as NLDAS, GLDAS, DAYMET, NCDC, PRISM, and WGEN. A simple workflow was developed as an HMS component to compare precipitation data from different sources. Comparison is performed using multiple rainfall statistics like the average, standard deviation, R-Squared, and the GORE index.
Description:
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) is developing REST API enabled hydrologic and water quality modeling and data provisioning services to support rapid development of optimal modeling work flows. This collection of services is housed under the ongoing Hydrologic Micro-Services (HMS) research project. Finding the right model to fit a given modeling problem continues to remain more of an art than science. Model selection is still driven by the modelers personal familiarity and experience. Scientists and engineers create new models when existing models don’t fit their requirements and it isn’t always feasible to modify existing codes. Similar problems exist for model parameterization. Environmental models typically require significant amounts of heterogeneous data from disparate data sources and in different formats. While the amount of data available for use in environmental modeling is unprecedented in its volume and diversity, accessing and integrating the data still provides formidable challenges. Numerous software tools have been developed to facilitate data acquisition and processing for model consumption. Often these are targeted for specific modeling systems although some have attempted to be less model centric in nature. HMS aims to demonstrate that building componentized modeling and modeling support micro services is a viable methodology for constructing modeling workflows. The goal is to develop an ecosystem of inter-operable water quantity and quality modeling components and environmental data access and processing services. Components are light weight and independent and lend themselves to containerization in a modern cloud environment when possible.
