Description: To tackle fundamental scientific questions regarding health, resilience, and sustainability of water resources that encompass hydrological, biological, environmental, atmospheric, and other geosciences that define the Earth system, researchers need to be able to easily access diverse data sources and to also effectively incorporate these data into heterogeneous models. Furthermore, models need to be easily integrated, and many models require supercomputing power to run. To address these cyberinfrastructure challenges, a new sustainable and easy-to-use Open Data and Open Modeling framework called CyberWater is currently under development, which is a collaborative NSF-funded project among the University of Pittsburgh, IUPUI/IU, CUAHSI, University of Iowa, NC State University, and Ball State University. One of the important features of our project is to enable CyberWater to access HPC facilities on demand since the complexity of some of the models and the volume of the data involved cannot be handled by a personal desktop.

To tackle fundamental scientific questions regarding health, resilience, and sustainability of water resources which encompass hydrological, biological, environmental, atmospheric, and other geosciences that define the Earth system, researchers need to be able to easily access diverse data sources and to also effectively incorporate these data into heterogeneous models. Furthermore, many models require supercomputing power to run and terabyte- or petabyte-scale disk space to store their massive outputs. To address these cyberinfrastructure challenges, a new sustainable and easy-to-use Open Data and Open Modeling framework called CyberWater is currently under development, which is a collaborative NSF-funded project among the University of Pittsburgh, IUPUI/IU, CUAHSI, University of Iowa, NC State University, and Ball State University. CyberWater addresses the challenges of accessing heterogeneous data sources via the Open Data architecture which adopts a common internal data model and representation to facilitate the integration of various external data sources. Data Agents are used to handle remote data access protocols, metadata standards, and source-specific implementations. The Open Modeling architecture allows different models to be easily integrated into CyberWater via Model Agents. CyberWater adopts a graphical scientific workflow system (VisTrails) and offers generic tools to help users develop model agents without coding. At present, CyberWater can run a land surface model (LSM) of the Variability Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model and a hydrological model of the Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM). Also, CyberWater is able to let the user to easily couple an LSM with a routing model. All these tasks are done automatically through the workflow with a user-friendly interface. Examples will be presented to illustrate the CyberWater system and the automatic flow from accessing data to model simulation results in a user-friendly workflow-controlled environment. All of the current and future functionalities of CyberWater will not only be thoroughly tested and evaluated by the development team but also by the water community. The CyberWater is aimed at the next generation of open data and modeling framework in cyberinfrastructure for broad earth science communities.