Can your desktop computer crunch the large GIS datasets that are becoming increasingly common across the geosciences? Do you have access to, or the know how to, take advantage of advanced high performance computing (HPC) capability? Web based cyberinfrastructure takes work off your desk or laptop computer and onto infrastructure or "cloud" based data and processing servers. This talk will describe the HydroShare collaborative environment and web based services being developed to support the sharing and processing of hydrologic data and models. HydroShare supports the storage and sharing of a broad class of hydrologic data including time series, geographic features and rasters, multidimensional space-time data and structured collections of data representing river geometry. Web service tools and a python client library provide researchers with access to high performance computing resources without requiring them to become HPC experts. This reduces the time and effort spent in finding and organizing the data required to prepare the inputs for hydrologic models and facilitates the management of online data and execution of models on HPC systems. This talk will illustrate web and client based use of data services that support the delineation of watersheds to define a modeling domain, then extract terrain and land use information to automatically configure the inputs required for hydrologic models. These services support the Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Model (TauDEM) tools for watershed delineation and generation of hydrology-based terrain information such as wetness index and stream networks. These services also support the derivation of inputs for the Utah Energy Balance snowmelt model used to address questions such as how climate, land cover and land use change may affect snowmelt inputs to runoff generation. These cases serve as examples for how this approach can be extended to other models to enhance the use of web and data services in the geosciences.

Presentation at Kansas University GIS Days November 18, 2015