Advancing Water Resource Modeling through a Community Hydrofabric: Developing shared standards, open data, and access

The critical processes that dominate the hydrologic cycle vary across space. Representing the diversity of these processes is a complex, data-intensive, and technically challenging task. Regardless of the processes, all hydrologic models require accurate geospatial data to define catchment boundaries, water bodies, hydrogeologic units, and their associated attributes. Even more data is necessary to drive, validate, and calibrate models with enhanced process options. Without shared data concepts, standards, and software, achieving this in a flexible and application-appropriate way becomes a time-consuming, resource-intensive, and often infeasible task. Following federal initiatives that began in 2020, the NOAA-NWS Office of Water Prediction (OWP) and the Water Mission Area of the USGS established a shared geospatial data and processing system to support a range of flexible and interoperable hydro-science applications through open data, software, and shared standards. One of the principal applications this product was designed to support is the NOAA Office of Water Prediction’s Next Generation Water Resources Framework (NextGen), its implementations in the National Water Model (NWM), and future iterations of the Flood Inundation Mapping (FIM) program. Here, we will explore how the adoption and development of shared data standards provide a common hydrologic and hydraulic routing framework for modeling and information sharing, and how they have been extended to support NextGen, enhancing its capacity to link, derive, and generate forcing, flowpath, and landscape data essential for a range of hydrologic, hydraulic, and decision support systems. In the spirit of this year's theme: “Towards a Thriving Planet: Charting the Course Across Scales,” we will highlight three key advancements: (1) extending the geographic scope over which NextGen can operate to encompass the entire United States, (2) the development of the first-of-its-kind 3D representation of the nation's waterways, which has demonstrated immediate utility in improving hydraulic routing options, channel representation, and inundation prediction, and (3) the release of an open and extensible data-sharing platform that enables researchers, modelers, and key stakeholders to access the specific data they need to advance the science and application of the NextGen Framework. These tools are already being integrated into key development ventures at the Alabama Water Institute (AWI), the Consortium for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH), the Next Generation Water Prediction Capability (NGWPC), the USGS, and NOAA OWP, marking the next step toward a community hydrofabric solution.