Integrating River Basins in the Multi-Agency HARBOR Collection with the NextGen Hydrofabric

The NOAA-USGS reference hydrofabric provides a flow network for the USA with a standardized representation of the connectivity of water bodies, including catchment boundaries and channel flowpaths. It is usable at a variety of scales and supports basins as small as a few square kilometers in size. The Next Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework (NextGen) Hydrofabric is derived from this reference product and is extended with a suite of flowpath and divide level attributes. This extension underpins NextGen, which will support successors to the National Water Model beyond version 3.1.

Just as many large cargo ships can be moored in the same harbor, the HARBOR (Harmonized Attributes of River Basins in One Repo) project brings together many different river basin data collections for the USA into one GitHub repository. This collection includes river basin data sets created by the USGS (e.g. Federal Priority Streamgages, GAGES-II, HCDN, HLR), NOAA (e.g. all RFC basins), USDA (ARS experimental watersheds), NSF (e.g. CZO, LTER, NEON), and other special collections which are subsets of these such as CAMELS and MOPEX. The repo provides easy access to all of these collections within a standardized directory structure. It also augments and harmonizes 51 of their key attributes --- including all known agency IDs --- in one large TSV (tab-separated values) file. When available, shapefiles and their associated attributes are included. All data sets that a given basin occurs in are also indicated. Whenever possible, missing data has been found from other sources and basins are classified by multiple methods based on their hydrologic similarity. A companion repo provides numerous open-source Python modules for working with and extracting information from each collection in the repo. This presentation will show how HARBOR and the NextGen Hydrofabric are complementary, and how they greatly simplify modeling in NextGen.