The NOAA Next Generation Water Resource Modeling Framework Hydrofabric

Hydrologic modeling requires accurate geospatial data to define catchment boundaries, water bodies, hydrogeologic units, and their associated attributes. Even more data is required to force, validate, and calibrate these models. Synchronizing all of these data inputs is an increasingly challenging task as the size of data and the number of required modeling tasks continue to grow. To meet these challenges, a robust data product that can define the hydrologic and land surface features in a flexible, interoperable, and extensible way is needed.

One of the most exciting modeling efforts underway is the NOAA Office of Water Prediction’s the Next Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework (NextGen). This framework seeks to support the selection and execution of parsimonious models to account for differences in hydroclimatology and hydrologic influences across large domains. For this framework to materialize however, there needs to be a data science system that can synchronize, populate, and account for diverse model needs, representation, execution, and output. This requirement provided the opportunity to modernize existing hydrographic data sets and data models to build a federally supported modeling fabric that meets the needs of not only NextGen but all USGS and NOAA modeling tasks including water quality, water supply, real time streamflow, and flood forecasting.

Using community standards from the hydrologic and spatial communities, the NextGen hydrofabric describes the representation, discretization, and topology of the hydrologic and hydrographic landscape, and its relationship to the coastal and groundwater domains. It proposes an integrative data model that has been used across a range and federal activities, and supports workflows to find, extract, summarize and reuse a diverse set of cloud native geospatial data (e.g., meteorological, soils, land cover) and paves the way for development of more advanced parameterization, calibration, and evaluation of model inputs and outputs. These products are delivered as open source data, and software, all focused on allowing the infrastructure to evolve with the changing needs of the users, stakeholders, and the science. This presentation will provide a high level introduction to our existing work, and highlight the critical materials needed to engage with the growing community around this topic.